A growing body of work has examined the relationship between media and politics from an agenda‐setting perspective: Is attention for issues initiated by political elites with the media following suit, or is the reverse relation stronger? A long series of single‐country studies has suggested a number of general agenda‐setting patterns but these have never been confirmed in a comparative approach. In a comparative, longitudinal design including comparable media and politics evidence for seven European countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), this study highlights a number of generic patterns. Additionally, it shows how the political system matters. Overall, the media are a stronger inspirer of political action in countries with single‐party governments compared to those with multiple‐party governments for opposition parties. But, government parties are more reactive to media under multiparty governments.

Who sets the agenda in Soviet politics? Three answers to that question are considered in this review article. According to the totalitarian model, the selection of action goals is the privilege of a relatively autonomous supreme leadership in control of hierarchically structured sub-systems. The pluralist model, by contrast, is based on the assumption that issues acquire significance through efficient pressures by mobilized group interests. While the totalitarian interpretation emphasizes the active element in the conduct of the supreme leadership, the pluralist model stresses the reactive and reflective ingredients. The bureaucratic model similarly assumes that vertical information flows can to a large extent be controlled from below, but it differs from the pluralist model in that it defines the key political conflicts as tensions among various bureaus. As a theory of fragmentation in large organizations, the bureaucratic model of the Soviet political system may have considerable relevance for the study of Western European government as well.

Does pledge fulfilment bear any electoral consequences for government parties? While previous research on retrospective voting has largely focused on electoral accountability with respect to the economy, the theoretical framework presented in this study links government parties’ performance to their previous electoral pledges. It is argued that government parties are more likely to be rewarded by voters when they have fulfilled more pledges during the legislative term. Good pledge performance of a party is associated with the ability to maximise policy benefits (accomplishment) and to be a responsible actor that will stick to its promises in the future as well (competence). Analysing data from 69 elections in 14 countries shows that a government party's electoral outcome is affected by its previous pledge performance. A government party that fulfils a higher share of election pledges is more likely to prevent electoral losses. This finding indicates that voters react at the polls to party pledge fulfilment, which highlights the crucial role of promissory representation in democratic regimes. Surprisingly and in contrast with economic voting, there is no evidence that retrospective pledge voting is moderated by clarity of responsibility.

The 1994 presidential election was the first direct election in two rounds in Finnish political history. It opened the gates for new political constellations where party loyalty was easily replaced by individual qualities of the candidates. At that time, a female candidate (Elisabeth Rehn) from the small Swedish People’s Party challenged the male candidate of the Social Democratic Party, which is the biggest party in Finland. Parties took note, and in the 2000 presidential election four candidates out of seven were female. In the 1994 election only two candidates of 11 were women, and of these only one was nominated by a party. Now all the biggest or the most influential parties except for the Centre Party (whose candidate was candidate Esko Aho) nominated women.

The invitation that I received to deliver the 1993 Stein Rokkan Lecture during the Joint Sessions of Workshops at the University of Leiden gave me the welcome opportunity, in the introductory remarks of my lecture, to honour the memory of the late Stein Rokkan and to pay tribute to his many scholarly contributions. But perhaps more than anything else, I said, he deserves to be honoured for his work as one of the Founding Fathers of the European Consortium for Political Research. The Consortium is one of the greatest success stories in the social sciences: it has created a high-quality and truly European political science out of the formerly disparate national political sciences in the different West European countries in an incredibly short time span.

Different types of interest groups use different lobbying strategies. This article presents an investigation of this already well‐established hypothesis once more, but additionally proposes that the institutional framework of the country in which interest groups operate also influences their lobbying behaviour. More specifically, it is shown that groups working in the interest of the public are better integrated into the policy‐making process when direct democratic instruments, such as referendums, occur regularly (as in Switzerland) than when referendums are the exception (Germany). The article demonstrates that Swiss cause groups – often also referred to as ‘public interest groups’ in the literature – use a more balanced mixture of insider and outsider strategies than their German peers, but also that this moderating effect cannot be found for specific interest groups, such as industry groups or unions.

How do democratic states induce citizens to comply with government directives during times of acute crisis? Focusing on the onset of the Covid‐19 pandemic in France, I argue that the tools states use to activate adherence to public health advice have predictable and variable effects on citizens’ willingness to change their routine private behaviours, both because of variation in their levels of restrictiveness but also because of differences in people's political motivations to comply with them. Using data collected in March 2020, I show that people's reports of changes in their behavioural routines are affected by the signals governments send, how they send them and the level of enforcement. I find that a nationally televised speech by President Macron calling for cooperative behaviour and announcing new restrictions elevated people's willingness to comply. Moreover, while co‐partisanship with the incumbent government increased compliance reports before the President's primetime television address, presidential approval boosted reports of compliance after.

How do welfare systems affect natives' attitudes to immigration? The impact of immigration on public support for welfare and redistribution has received considerable scholarly attention, but we know much less about how welfare policies shape citizens' views about immigration. We focus on two mechanisms: an instrumental channel and a values‐based approach. Our empirical strategy is two‐pronged. Hierarchical models leveraging variation in immigration attitudes and welfare generosity both between countries and over time (2002–2019) suggest that more comprehensive welfare regimes are associated with more positive views of immigrants. Furthermore, a regression discontinuity design drawing on a natural experiment in Denmark reveals that hostility towards immigrants increased following the announcement of a welfare retrenchment reform. Together, these analyses shed light on how the welfare state influences immigration attitudes.

This study examines how meso-level institutions within Ostrom’s polycentric governance systems guide farmers’ deliberative preferences for collective adaptation to saltwater inundation in the Philippines and Viet Nam. Specifically, the paper investigates three mechanisms of meso-institutional influence: legitimacy creation, belief formation, and social enforcement that shape farmers’ collective adaptation. Using multinomial logistic regression with cluster-robust standard errors on survey data from rice farmers, results show that institutional embeddedness depends on both physical exposure and socioeconomic capacity; information access enhances belief accuracy and collective preferences in contexts where institutional trust is high; and legitimacy-based feasibility significantly strengthens support for collective measures. Findings also show country differences in managing high-externality adaptation measures, with only Viet Nam exhibiting sensitivity to institutional quality at higher externality levels. Comparative results reveal that autonomous, participatory meso-institutions in the Philippines generate stronger deliberative preferences and more cohesive collective adaptation than state-centred structures in Viet Nam.

The classical outbidding model of ethnic politics argues that democratic competition involving ethnic parties inevitably leads to ethnic outbidding where parties adopt ever more extreme positions. However, recent small‐N studies show that ethnic outbidding is only one of a range of strategies available to ethnic parties. This article seeks to explain why some ethnic parties are extremist, whereas others adopt moderate positions. Drawing on the ethnic outbidding and the nested competition model of ethnic party competition, it is hypothesised that the ethnic segmentation of the electoral market, and the relative salience of an ethnically cross‐cutting economic dimension of party competition, account for the varying degrees of extremism. Hypotheses are tested drawing on a novel, expert‐survey‐based dataset that provides indicators for the positions of 83 ethnonational minority parties in 22 European democracies in 2011. Results of ordinary least squares and two‐level linear regressions show that as the economic dimension gains importance, parties become more moderate relative to the party system mean. The electorate's ethnic segmentation has a positive effect on extremism, but this effect is not significant in all models. Contrary to expectations, higher ethnic segmentation of the party system is associated with more moderate positions in the majority of the estimated models.

This article undertakes a comprehensive investigation into several common critiques of career politicians. Career politicians are said to be self‐serving: active and assertive when it suits their career interests, and much more interested in attaining higher offices than in serving as constituency‐oriented MPs. Yet, empirical investigations of their alleged behaviours are few, and the results are patchy and mixed. Focusing on the United Kingdom case and using a multi‐dimensional conceptualization that accords with academic and popular understandings of career politicians, the article draws on uniquely rich attitudinal and longitudinal behavioural data covering the first large generational wave of career politicians to be elected to parliament in the early 1970s. It reports findings consistent with contemporary critiques, suggesting that such dispositions are inherent in the role of career politician. The strongest career politicians among this first wave concentrated strategically on career‐serving activities, voted strategically to safeguard their careers, attained and retained successfully ministerial offices and prioritized their personal goals over their party obligations. The article further demonstrates that different measures used by researchers can produce contradictory results and that future comparative research should seek to range beyond unidimensional indicators.

Tolerance has long been identified as a crucial feature of liberal democracies. Although the limits of tolerance are debated, the extent to which citizens are open and willing to accommodate others who are different from them is often regarded as a sign of a healthy and well‐functioning liberal democracy. The goal of this paper is to empirically investigate the state of political tolerance in Europe today. The main questions we ask are: What explains the different levels of tolerance across individuals in various countries? Which groups in society are the most likely targets of intolerance? We understand political tolerance as the willingness to allow the free articulation of interests and ideas in the political system of groups one opposes. Previous research emphasizes education, civic activism and threat perceptions as important determinants of tolerance. We redirect the debate to a set of novel correlates of tolerance. We argue that conspiratorial thinking and cosmopolitanism are critical factors that explain levels of tolerance among Europeans. The analysis employs original survey data collected as part of a mass survey conducted in 2017 in 10 European Union member states: Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom. Our descriptive analysis shows that far‐right groups (i.e., fascists and neo‐Nazis) and Muslims are the most disliked groups in Europe. When it comes to the level of tolerance towards these groups, we find that more than half of the respondents in each country are willing to deny their most disliked group parliamentary representation. Moreover, we find that even after controlling for traditional determinants of tolerance, conspiratorial thinking and cosmopolitanism emerge as the most important predictors of political tolerance. Our analysis suggests that the recent rapid spread of various conspiracy theories related to the COVID‐19 pandemic is likely to have far‐reaching implications for tolerance as well.

Current comparative policy research gives no clear answer to the question of whether partisan politics in general or the partisan composition of governments in particular matter for different morality policy outputs across countries and over time. This article addresses this desideratum by employing a new encompassing dataset that captures the regulatory permissiveness in six morality policies that are homosexuality, same‐sex partnership, prostitution, pornography, abortion and euthanasia in 16 European countries over five decades from 1960 to 2010. Given the prevalent scepticism about a role for political parties for morality policies in existing research, this is a ‘hard’ test case for the ‘parties do matter’ argument. Starting from the basic theoretical assumption that different party families, if represented in national governments to varying degrees, ought to leave differing imprints on morality policy making, this research demonstrates that parties matter when accounting for the variation in morality policy outputs. This general statement needs to be qualified in three important ways. First, the nature of morality policy implies that party positions or preferences cannot be fully understood by merely focusing on one single cleavage alone. Instead, morality policy is located at the interface of different cleavages, including not only left‐right and secular‐religious dimensions, but also the conflicts between materialism and postmaterialism, green‐alternative‐libertarian and traditional‐authoritarian‐nationalist (GAL‐TAN) parties, and integration and demarcation. Second, it is argued in this article that the relevance of different cleavages for morality issues varies over time. Third, partisan effects can be found only if individual cabinets, rather than country‐years, are used as the unit of analysis in the research design. In particular, party families that tend to prioritise individual freedom over collective interests (i.e., left and liberal parties) are associated with significantly more liberal morality policies than party families that stress societal values and order (i.e., conservative/right and religious parties). While the latter are unlikely to overturn previous moves towards permissiveness, these results suggest that they might preserve the status quo at least. Curiously, no systematic effects of green parties are found, which may be because they have been represented in European governments at later periods when morality policy outputs were already quite permissive.