This article develops a cognitive institutionalist account of mass and elite evaluations of political ethics, which is tested on a new dataset from the United Kingdom. The analysis explores the extent of contemporary disagreement among British political elites and those they represent by comparing responses to questions asked in a representative survey of the public with similar questions asked of incumbent MPs and parliamentary candidates. There are systematic differences between members of the public, candidates and MPs at both aggregate and individual levels – differences which can be accounted for with reference to the framing effects of Parliament as an institution. Candidates for parliamentary office display significantly more tolerance of ethically dubious behaviour than other members of the public. Within the elite category, elected MPs exhibit more permissive ethical standards than those candidates who are unsuccessful.

We examine long‐run effects of automation risk on turnout. We expect gendered negative effects because men's turnout is more sensitive to job loss and earnings, but negative effects might be offset by populist right‐wing mobilization on economic grievances. We rely on population‐wide administrative data to avoid well‐known biases in survey data. We find both men and women with high automation risk to suffer in the labour market, but automation risk is associated with lower turnout for men only. The negative association with turnout is weaker where the populist right is stronger, consistent with mobilization on economic grievances. Finally, we show experimentally that priming of automation risk produces null findings, suggesting that risks need to have material consequences to affect political behaviour. Our findings imply that technological change has contributed to the emergence of gender gaps in turnout and populist voting as well as the participation drop among the working class.

One important change to the institutional structure of Canada took place during the year. It is not likely to affect large numbers of Canadians directly but points, as did a number of other events (see discussion below), to the country’s continuing attempts to respond to the claims of some of its aboriginal peoples. On April 1, the new territory of Nunavut (which means ‘our land’ in Inuktitut) was carved out of the Northwest Territory. This followed from a decision made by referendum (see the Political Data Yearbook 1993) to create a self-governing territory for the eastern and central Artic that would have a native majority. The new territory (a status somewhat less than that of the constitutionally sovereign provinces) of over two million square km spans three time zones but has a population of less than thirty thousand.

The conventional wisdom concerning the choice between majoritarian electoral systems and proportional representation (PR) ‐ and, more broadly, between majoritarian and consensus forms of democracy ‐ is that there is a trade‐off: PR and consensus democracy provide more accurate representation and better minority representation, but majoritarianism provides more effective government. A comparative analysis of 18 older and well‐established democracies, most of which are European democracies, shows that PR and consensus democracy indeed give superior political representation, but that majoritarian systems do not perform better in maintaining public order and managing the economy, and hence that the over‐all performance of consensus democracy is superior. This conclusion should also be tested among the growing number of slightly newer non‐European democracies, which are already old enough to have proved their viability and can be studied over an extended period of time. If its validity is confirmed ‐ and the evidence so far is very promising ‐ it can have great practical significance for the future of democracy in the world.

Despite major interest in issue ownership, what shapes it remains a puzzle. In his pioneering work on issue ownership, John Petrocik emphasises the importance of a party's performance. Recent research acknowledges this by pointing to the role of real‐world problems and incumbency for issue ownership. However, if performance truly matters, it should be difficult to understand the impact of such problems without taking into account the government's response to it. Based on novel data on issue ownership, policy development and government attention across five issues in nine countries over time, the analysis shows that the government's issue‐handling reputation is associated with the policy development, and the government's attention to the problem is important for this association. This is especially true for parties with no history of issue ownership on the issue and if the government is a coalition or in minority.

Strategic trajectory planning (STP) is critical for improving flight efficiency and ensuring operational safety, particularly in large-scale flight operations. Given the long lead time of STP, accurately analysing wind forecast uncertainty is essential to enhancing the quality of planned trajectories. However, most existing research overlooks the time-variant nature of wind forecast uncertainty. This may lead to significant discrepancies between planned and actual flight trajectories, increasing operational costs and conflict risks. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel bilevel STP framework for large-scale flights that explicitly accounts for time-variant wind forecast uncertainty. The upper-level model optimises trajectories across multiple flights to minimise total flight time, based on the departure times determined by the lower-level model. The lower-level model mitigates potential conflicts by adjusting the departure times according to the trajectories selected by the upper level. To solve this problem efficiently, a time-variant A* algorithm (TVA*) and a multi-objective cooperative co-evolution algorithm (MOCCEA) are developed, supported by static expectation (SE) and dynamic equilibrium grouping (DEG) strategies to accelerate computation. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method yields consistently dominant Pareto fronts, significantly enhancing flight efficiency while ensuring operational safety and fairness.

This study examines interest groups’ agenda‐setting influence, a question extensively theorised but lacking empirical investigation. Specifically, it explores whether business groups are more effective than citizen groups in pushing their ‘dream’ issues on the policy agenda while keeping their ‘nightmare’ issues off. Empirically, I rely on a content analysis of 818 media articles, 37 interviews with public officials and 148 interviews with interest representatives, all involved in 56 EU policy issues. The findings demonstrate that citizen groups are more influential in the agenda‐setting stage when compared to their business counterparts, particularly when they garner media visibility. These results bear important implications for democratic governance, offering new insights into the political influence wielded by interest groups.

Various strands of literature in comparative politics regard governments as the only noteworthy initiators and mainsprings of legislative policy making in parliamentary democracies. Opposition activity in policy making is more often associated with the intention to prevent, rather than to shape, policy. Does this perception reflect real‐life politics? To answer this question, this article discusses different arguments that link institutional and policy‐related characteristics to the incentives and constraints of different government and parliamentary actors to initiate or co‐sponsor legislative bills. More specifically, it relates policy‐, office‐ and vote‐related incentives, as well as institutional and resource constraints of legislative actors, to the likelihood that these actors will take the lead in legislative agenda‐setting. These arguments are confronted with original data on the universe of all legislative bills in four parliamentary systems over one and a half decades. The article concludes that opposition and, in particular, bipartisan agenda‐setting is indeed rare. Yet, in contrast to widely held maxims, it is neither absent nor spurious, but related to the allocation of power and the intensity of ideological conflict both within and between the (coalition) government and parliament.

In many European countries, people increasingly leave rural or small municipalities to live and work in urban or metropolitan environments. Although previous work on the ‘left behind’ places has examined the relationship between the rural–urban divide and vote choice, less is known about how depopulation affects electoral behaviour. Is there a relationship between experiencing a loss in population and support for the different parties? We investigate this question by examining the Spanish case, a country where the topic of depopulation has become a salient issue in political competition. Using a newly compiled dataset, we also explore whether the relationship between depopulation and electoral returns is moderated by municipality size, local compositional changes, the loss of public services and changes in amenities. Our findings show that depopulated municipalities give higher support to the main Conservative party, mainly in small municipalities. Yet, municipalities on the brink of disappearance are more likely to give larger support to the far‐right. Results overall show that the effect of depopulation seems to be driven by compositional changes, and not as a result of losing public services or a deterioration of the vibrancy of the town. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between internal migration and electoral behaviour.

Recent research has shown that sexual and/or gender minority voters are prone to mobilizing when LGBT+ issues are on the political agenda. This increased level of political engagement is attributed to the experience of discrimination, understood both in legal and social terms, which spurs LGBT+ individuals to participate with the aim of advancing their rights. However, a crucial question remains unanswered: do these gaps in participation persist in contexts where core LGBT+ rights are protected? Drawing from comprehensive and verified data on the population of Sweden, this study finds evidence of a positive and sustained sexuality‐driven voter turnout gap across multiple elections. This gap manifests itself both shortly and a decade after the enactment of same‐sex marriage and shows no tangible signs of abating. In addition to improving our knowledge of political participation patterns among sexual minorities, these findings underscore the potential role of minority rights protection as a mechanism to ensure enduring inclusion of social minority groups within democratic processes.

Mass emails are frequently used by advocacy groups to mobilise supporters to lobby legislators. But how effective are they at inducing constituent‐to‐legislator lobbying when the stakes are high? We test the efficacy of a large‐scale email campaign conducted by the UK's main anti‐Brexit organisation. In 2019, the group prominently displayed a ‘Write to your MP’ tool on their website and assigned 119,362 supporters represented by legislators with incongruent views to one of four email messages encouraging them to write to their MP or a control condition (no email). Messages varied across two factors: whether the MP's incongruent position was highlighted, and if urgency was emphasised. We find that 3.4 per cent of treatment subjects contacted their representative, compared to 0.1 per cent of those in the control, representing an additional 3,344 emails sent to MPs. We show that there was no substitution away from the most frequently used online legislator contact platform in the United Kingdom. While, on average, position and urgency cues had no marginal effects above the standard email, the most engaged supporters were more mobilised when informed that their MP held incongruent views. This study shows that advocacy groups can use low‐cost communication techniques to mobilise supporters to lobby representatives when the stakes are high.

On 15 March 1999 the first reshuffle of the cabinet since its formation on 17 October 1997 took place. Four ministers resigned or were replaced. TheMinister of Justice and the Police, Aud Inger Aure, was forced to resign due to ill health, and was replaced by the Minister of Communications and Transport, Odd Einar Dørum. His position was taken over by the Minister of Defence, Dag Jostein Fjærvoll, who handed his ministry over to Eldbjørg Løwer, the first woman ever to hold this position in Norwegian politics. Laila Dåvøy replaced her as Minister of Planning and Coordination. Finally, the Minister of Local Government and Labor, Ragnhild Queseth Haarstad, had for some time signaled a wish to retire from politics. She was replaced by Odd Roger Enoksen, the new leader of the Center Party. The party’s former leader, Mrs. Anne Enger Lahnstein, had played a prominent role on the ‘No to EU side’ during the 1990–94 EU-debate, but at the party congress in December 1998 she had announced her decision to resign from her position as party leader. On 7 October 1999 Mrs. Lahnstein announced her resignation as Minister of Culture. She was replaced by Åslaug Marie Haga.

A growing body of literature shows that the preferences of poorer groups in society are less well represented than the preferences of the rich. This paper scrutinises one possible explanation of inequality in representation: that politicians hold biased perceptions of what citizens want. We conducted surveys with citizens and politicians in four countries: Belgium, Switzerland, Canada and Germany. Citizens provided their preferences regarding concrete policy proposals, and then politicians estimated these preferences. Comparing politicians’ estimates with the actual preferences of different social groups, the paper shows that politicians’ perceptions are closer to the preferences of the richer than to those of poorer people for issues that matter most for economic inequality: socio‐economic issues. Further, we find that especially right‐wing politicians tend to think about the preferences of richer societal groups when estimating the preferences of their partisan electorates on socio‐economic matters.

As breeding has become increasingly specialized over the last decades, modern dairy breeds have mainly been focusing on milk production, producing bull and surplus female calves with low economic value. To address this dilemma, the present study evaluates how crossbreeding with the specialized beef breed Belgian Blue and pure breeding with Holstein-Friesian bulls affect calving ease and subsequent fattening performance, and carcass quality in Holstein-Friesian herds. For the study, pedigree information, calving information, as well as fattening performance and carcass quality parameters of 5,162 fattening bulls sired by either Holstein-Friesian (n = 4,607) or Belgian Blue (n = 555) sires from Holstein-Friesian cows in northern Germany were considered. Crossbred calves had higher birth weights and better carcass conformation ratings but also higher age at slaughter, carcass weight and average daily weight gain than purebred dairy calves, reflecting beef breeds’ superior muscle development. However, crossbreeding with Belgian Blue sires also increased the frequency of difficult births (dystocia), which has previously been shown to negatively impact calf health. The effect of parity was not relevant for fattening and carcass quality parameters but highlighted the present breeding practice of using beef sires in multiparous rather than in primiparous cows. Seasonal variations were also observed, with spring and summer-born bulls exhibiting faster weight gain.

Although scholars of West European politics have long debated whether the region's highly institutionalised party systems were becoming de‐aligned and electorally unstable, the political fallout from the post‐2008 financial crisis has lent a new sense of urgency to the debate. The threats posed to party systems by economic crises are hardly unique to Europe, however. The Latin American experience with the debt crisis of the 1980s and 1990s suggests that party system upheaval was not simply a function of retrospective economic voting during the period of crisis. It was also attributable to programmatically de‐aligning policy responses to crises – namely the ‘bait‐and‐switch’ imposition of austerity and adjustment measures by labour‐based, left‐leaning parties that were traditional champions of statist and redistributive policies. Such patterns of reform made it difficult for party systems to channel societal resistance to market orthodoxy in the post‐adjustment era, setting the stage for convulsive ‘reactive sequences’ when such resistance arose outside and against mainstream parties through varied forms of social and electoral protest, typically on the left flank. This article explores the political fallout from the European and Latin American economic crises from a comparative perspective, arguing that it is essential to think beyond the short‐term political dynamics of crisis management to consider the longer‐term institutional legacies and fragilities of the different political alignments forged around crisis‐induced policy reforms.

This article investigates whether the smaller gender gaps in political engagement, found in more proportional electoral systems, translate into smaller gender differences in political participation. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, it presents the argument that more proportional systems may send signals that multiple interests are included in the policy‐making process, which may increase women's levels of political participation and thereby reduce gender gaps. Additionally, the article tests for the possibility that a greater number of political parties and the elected representatives they provide act as barriers to political participation that have a greater impact on women's levels of participation than men's. It is argued that women's lower levels of political resources and engagement might create more difficult barriers for them than for men. Results lend little support for the first hypothesis, but a greater confirmation for the second.