Where some researchers have seen only a limited impact of Europeanisation on national party politics, others have added a separate European Union dimension to the pre‐existing economic left‐right dimension to model the national political space. This article examines the effects of the European crisis on the national political space across the EU utilising data from the 2014 European Election Survey. It analyses the effect of a country's economic development on the coherence between attitudes towards the EU and economic issues using multilevel regression. Strong evidence is found that in the Southern European debtor states economic and European issues are merging as a result of strong European interference in their economic policy. In the Northern European creditor states a second relevant dimension focuses on cultural issues. These results offer the next step in theorising Europeanisation.

Concerns about widespread democratic dissatisfaction have prompted a search for remedies, such as increasing citizens’ role in politics. While the public seems supportive, it remains unclear whether such newly introduced procedures can effectively tackle citizens’ dissatisfaction with present‐day politics. This paper develops a problem‐solving approach to studying this question. It proposes that combining insights on what ‘pushes’ and ‘pulls’ people to support procedural reform is crucial: Only then can we uncover if and how people consider procedural reform as addressing the problem(s) they see in the representative system today. Using the example of deliberative minipublics and original, pre‐registered survey data from Belgium (n = 1,579), we find that respondents generally think of minipublics as problem‐solvers rather than problem‐creators, albeit to different degrees. For instance, this perceived problem‐solving potential is more pronounced among discontent citizens. This study sheds new light on the importance of studying citizens’ reasoning about the roots and remedies for political dissatisfaction.

Scholars and commentators increasingly wonder whether governments’ failure to address socio‐economic inequalities is the result of unequal representation. Recent literature on policy responsiveness in the United States and Europe finds evidence that party and parliamentary policy proposals and actual policy outcomes are closer to the preferences of the rich than of the poor. However, the extent and character of such unequal representation remains thinly understood. Among the most thinly understood mechanisms are the political conditions that link socio‐economic inequalities to unequal representation. This paper thickens our understanding of (unequal) representation by investigating the class composition of parliamentary cabinets and its effect on social welfare policy. With the aid of a new dataset on cabinet ministers’ social class, the paper shows that responsiveness to the social welfare preferences of poorer voters varies by cabinet ministers’ professional backgrounds, above and beyond the partisan orientation of the government.

The Althingi election of 1999 saw a major reshuffling of party alternatives in Iceland. Only the two partners in the right wing coalition, the Independence Party and the Progressive Party, remained of the six parties which won representation in 1995. The others merged in the Alliance, an electoral alliance aiming at the unification of the left in Iceland. Two additional parties, however, managed to win seats in 1999. The Liberal Party was formed primarily to oppose the system of fisheries management and the Left-Greens emerged as a left wing splinter group from the attempt at amalgamation on the left. Despite this re-organisation the co-operation of the governing parties was renewed after the election.

Do perceived foreign policy failures shape assessments of a country’s leadership in the eyes of international observers? We explore the consequences of foreign policy failures using global reactions to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some argue that a poorly executed withdrawal heightened concerns about America’s soft power and image abroad. Others believe that the negative consequences of the withdrawal were exaggerated. To adjudicate between these claims, we compile public opinion surveys across 24 countries containing over 17,000 respondents. Analyzing perceptions of US leadership before and after the fall of Kabul on 15 August 2021, we find that the Afghanistan withdrawal had a substantive negative impact on global perceptions of US leadership. However, we observe no corresponding evidence that the attractiveness of great powers is ‘zero-sum’: decreases in favorability towards the United States were not paralleled by increases in the perceived attractiveness of alternatives to US leadership like Russia and China.

The new millennium opened with two historic firsts that signaled the changing face of public life in Canada. In January, the government appointed BeverleyMcLachlin as the first woman Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. At a time when the court was being recognized as a significant player in the politics of the country – later in the year it declared the controversial Nisga’a Treaty providing for aboriginal self-government (see Political Data Yearbook 2000) constitutional – Justice McLachlin’s ascendancy was widely hailed as confirming the changed place of women in Canadian society. Then, a month later, Ujjal Dosanjh won the leadership of the British Columbia New Democratic Party and was sworn in as the province’s premier. Born and raised in India, Dosanjh had immigrated to Canada as a young man.

Historians have documented that in medieval Europe, bargaining over the loyalty of lay magnates and high clergy was most intense during successions and that this often forced monarchs to give political concessions. We argue that matters related to succession predict short‐term power‐sharing concessions by rulers but that – because they do not permanently alter the balance of power between ruler and elite – they only trigger lasting changes of political institutions if these changes are in the mutual interest of the ruler and the elite groups. It follows that successions are unlikely to have long‐term effects on representative institutions but that they may consolidate the rules regulating succession (the succession order). Using the natural deaths of monarchs as an instrument for successions, we confirm these claims with a new dataset that includes fine‐grained data on succession and parliament‐like assemblies in 16 European polities between 1000 and 1600. These findings shed new light on the development of representative institutions in medieval Europe, on the changes in succession orders that brought about clear rules about primogeniture and on the political leeway of legislatures in authoritarian regimes more generally.

Decreasing CO2 emissions, a top priority of climate change mitigation, requires moving away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy. Research shows that women tend to exhibit more knowledge about climate change, environmental concerns, and pro-environmental behaviour than men. Theories linking descriptive and substantive representation suggest that women representatives better represent women citizens’ policy preferences. Therefore, do higher levels of women's parliamentary participation increase renewable energy consumption? A time-series cross-sectional analysis of 100 democracies from 1997 to 2017 provides evidence for such a relationship in both high- and middle-income democracies. Lagged modelling demonstrates that high-income states see more immediate effects while they take longer to materialize in middle-income states. These findings contribute to our growing understanding of women's role in policymaking outside of ‘women's issues’ and offer a means of advancing climate-friendly energy policy.

Political scientists have long debated whether citizens meet the expectations of a ‘folk theory’ of democratic representation, in which voters correctly reward and punish politicians for their actions, make choices primarily on the basis of policy preferences and orient their decisions to the future rather than the past. But how do elected politicians themselves theorize voting behaviour? In this paper, we report results from an original survey of more than 2000 elected local politicians in Canada and the United States which allows us to characterize politicians' own democratic theories. We uncover substantial variation in politicians' theories of democracy, and we find examples of a number of well‐known theoretical traditions (democratic realism, partisan retrospection, folk theory) among politicians themselves. We also show that politicians' theoretical perspectives are related to how they undertake representation when in office. We conclude with an outline of a comparative research agenda on the causes and consequences of politicians' democratic theories.

Political disagreement in interpersonal communication increases attitudinal ambivalence and can depress voter turnout. These effects seem to be driven by a wish to avoid social controversy rather than informational gains from encountering other opinions. This article shows that political disagreement in interpersonal communication increases the difficulty of deciding for which party to vote. Moreover, this effect is a result of social disapproval of one's party preference, while political expertise in interpersonal communication has no effect. For voter turnout, no direct effect of social disapproval of one's party preference is found. However, disapproval has an indirect influence on turnout via difficulty of vote choice. In sum, both political attitudes and political behaviour are affected by social pressures. Students of political attitudes and behaviour should try to include interpersonal discussion in their models in greater detail than is common practice today.

Research on government formation in parliamentary democracies has presented contradicting evidence on the role of political veto institutions and parliamentary polarization on the formation of cabinet types. Institutional rules may either provide significant leeway for political parties or seriously constrain them when forming sustainable coalitions. In contrast to previous studies we argue that the effect of political institutions is conditional on the degree of polarization in parliament. We test our hypotheses using original data on 842 cabinet formations in 33 advanced democracies between 1945–2018. In line with previous research, we find that the institutional rules have a pronounced effect on the type of cabinet formed, but that institutional rules moderate the effect of party system polarization. Thus, our findings provide important new insights on cabinet formation which are particularly relevant for today's increasingly polarized parliaments.

In recent years, scholars have observed that political parties’ policy positions frequently fit the preferences of well‐to‐do voters better than those of the less well‐to‐do; a phenomenon known as policy congruence inequality. While the existence of inequality in policy congruence is well‐established, we currently only have a modest understanding of the causes of it. We develop an argument proposing that the political mobilisation of citizens with low socioeconomic status (SES) both in the parliamentary channel, in the form of high turnout, and in the extra‐parliamentary channel, in the form of high union density, is pivotal. Both high turnout and union density force parties to pay more attention to the preferences of the disadvantaged, thereby creating lower policy congruence inequality. To test the argument, we have collected and harmonised election surveys and party manifestos covering 90 elections in Australia, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, covering several decades until today, yielding more than 120,000 voter–party dyads. Employing this new dataset, our results confirm that the political mobilisation of citizens with low SES is a strong predictor of policy congruence inequality. This finding nuances the conclusion of extant research by showing that low‐SES citizens are not always on the losing side politically. It also implies the important role of maintaining or maybe even increasing turnout and union membership among the disadvantaged in society. Places where either turnout or union density is slipping in these years are likely to witness further increases in policy congruence inequality in the years to come.

The Kosovo crisis and the elections to the European Parliament were the two topics that affected politics in most of the 29 countries treated in this issue of the Political Data Yearbook. The military actions of NATO countries against Serbia were mostly approved of, except in Greece, where the general public supported the Serbs, placing the Greek government in a rather difficult position. Political parties in Italy, a country deeply involved in the military operations, were divided on the issue. And Central European countries learned the consequences of their recent membership of NATO, in that they were asked to support Western military action against a country in Eastern Europe.

Elite ideological polarization is rising in Western democracies. Is this elite ideological polarization associated with mass ideological polarization? I argue that when a party adopts a more extreme position, the masses polarize via two mechanisms. In‐partisans should follow the party and adopt a more extreme ideological stance while out‐partisans should backlash and move in the opposite direction. To test these expectations, I exploit a real‐world sudden party polarization when the Labour Party of the United Kingdom suddenly shifted to the left under new leadership. Using British Election Study Internet Panel data, I find limited evidence that elite polarization leads to mass polarization. Overall, neither in‐partisans followed the party, nor out‐partisans backlashed to it. Only ideologically out‐of‐touch in‐partisans adjusted their ideological stance to match their party, indicating the effectiveness of partisan cues, nonetheless. These findings provide insight into how the masses react to increasing party polarization, alleviating pundits' concerns that the masses are blind followers and bound to polarize if political parties polarize.

Populists believe in the sovereignty of the people. Yet, the people can be construed in ethnic terms or in civic terms. Using a novel wording experiment in Germany (N = 7,034), we examine whether ethnic or civic conceptions of ‘the people’ affect respondents' adherence to key populist attitude items. ‘Volk’ in German has an ethno‐nationalist connotation and has been used throughout history to signify ‘ethnic Germans’. The concept ‘Bürger’, or citizens, by contrast, lacks an ethnic undercurrent. Similar ethnic connotations of ‘the people’ are also common in other languages. We find that there are statistically significant differences between items framed in an ethnic and a civic manner – and that this differs per item. This relationship is significantly moderated by respondents' degree of exclusive national identity and voting behaviour for the radical right. Our findings suggest that the way in which the people is conceptualized has important implications for the measurement of populist attitudes. When populist attitudes are measured with an ethnic understanding of the ‘the people’, the construct is biased towards right‐wing populism, inhibiting the measurement of populism as a ‘thin ideology’. Moreover, we demonstrate the importance of careful translations in comparative research, since some translated synonyms carry different semantic meanings and thereby change the concept under investigation.

An short Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ) was developed for online assessment of adherence to the Dutch Mediterranean-DASH Diet Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay (MIND-NL) diet, a culturally adapted version of the original American MIND diet. This study aimed to evaluate the relative validity of this short FFQ for assessing adherence to the MIND-NL diet, as scored by the MIND-NL score, compared to three-day food records among community-dwelling older adults at risk of cognitive decline (N=1078; 67.4±4.6 years; 64% female). A combination of statistical methods was used to assess the relative validity: presence of bias by Bland-Altman analysis; strength of association with Kendall’s Tau-b and Spearman correlation coefficients; and levels of agreement with Wilcoxon signed rank test, cross-classification, and weighted Kappa (κ) statistics. The Kendall’s Tau-b correlation for the MIND-NL score was 0.33 (95% CI: 0.29-0.37; de-attenuated Tau-b: 0.45). Individual MIND-NL diet component score correlations ranged from 0.05 to 0.56, with 12 out of 15 of the MIND-NL diet components adequately correlated (>0.20). The average MIND-NL scores for the short FFQ (8.4±1.8 points) and food records (6.7±1.7 points) showed to be significantly different (P<0.001). The Kappa (κ) coefficient for tertile classification of the MIND-NL score was 0.29 (95% CI: 0.25-0.33), indicating an acceptable level of agreement in ranking participants beyond chance. Acceptable agreements (κ >0.20) were observed for 10 out of 15 MIND-NL diet components. Taking all analyses together, the short FFQ showed acceptable validity for ranking older adults at risk of cognitive decline according to their adherence to the MIND-NL diet.

Political parties and interest groups play a vital role in incorporating societal interests into democratic decision‐making. Therefore, explaining the nature and variation in the relationship between them will advance our understanding of democratic governance. Existing research has primarily drawn attention to how exchange of resources shapes these relationships largely neglecting the role of contextual conditions. Our contribution is to examine whether parties’ structured interactions with different categories of interest groups vary systematically with the pattern of party competition at the level of policy dimensions. First, we argue that higher party fragmentation in a policy space makes organisational ties to interest groups more likely, due to fears of voter loss and splinter groups. Second, we expect higher polarisation between parties on a policy dimension to make ties to relevant groups less likely due to increased electoral costs. We find support for both expectations when analysing new data on 116 party units in 13 mature democracies along nine different policy dimensions. Our findings underline the value of considering the strategic context in which parties and interest groups interact to understand their relationship. The study sheds new light on parties and interest groups as intermediaries in democracy and contributes to a new research agenda connecting interest group research with studies of parties’ policy positions and responsiveness.