Scholars have repeatedly expressed concern about the consequences low levels of political trust might have for the stability of democratic political systems. Empirical support and the identification of causal mechanisms for this concern, however, are often lacking. In this article, the relation between political trust and law‐abiding attitudes is investigated. It is expected that citizens with low levels of trust in the institutions of the political system will find it more acceptable to break the law. As a result, low levels of political trust might undermine the effectiveness and legitimacy of government action and its ability to implement legislation. Based on survey data from 33 European countries using the 1999–2001 European Values Study (N = 41,125), the relation between political trust and legal permissiveness is examined using a multilevel ordered logistic regression analysis. The results show that respondents with low levels of political trust are significantly more likely to accept illegal behaviour such as tax fraud than respondents with high levels of political trust. Since it is known from earlier research that actors who are permissive towards law‐breaking behaviour are more likely to commit these acts themselves, the hypothesis that low levels of political trust will be associated with less law compliance within a society is supported.

We use a natural experiment to study how the announcement of the UK COVID‐19 lockdown affected citizens' attitudes towards the pandemic and the government's response to it. On the day of the lockdown announcement, YouGov ran a survey that captured responses before and after the announcement. Comparison of these responses suggests that the lockdown announcement made people more supportive of the government's response to the crisis but also (perhaps surprisingly) more concerned about the pandemic. Analysis of heterogeneous treatment effects suggests that the announcement narrowed gaps in perceptions of the crisis, increasing support for the government's response especially among those who had been least supportive and increasing concern about the pandemic especially among those who had been least concerned. Overall, the findings highlight a tension inherent in governing during times of crisis: actions that increase people's confidence in government and induce compliance with government directives may also tend to increase anxiety among the population.

Despite the generally accepted weakness of trade unions at the European Union level, an analysis of two high profile cases – the Services Directive and the Port Directive – shows that trade unions are able to mobilise effectively at the European level and, within constellations of actors, crucially impact EU decision making. In contrast to common claims that a lack of access to EU institutions makes such groups powerless, it is argued here that the exclusion of large opposing societal groups from consultations is neither a quick nor a sure fire recipe for dismantling opposition. On the contrary, it politicises the process and may lead to opposing groups mobilising in more contentious ways.

Legally independent central banks leave elected politicians with little direct control over monetary policy. The most important indirect channel of influence for governments thus consists in appointing ‘responsive’ central bank officials and removing ‘hostile’ ones. This premise is tested by examining the effect of partisan ties between central bank governors and governments or presidents in 30 European democracies between 1945 and 2012. Drawing on an original dataset containing information on the party affiliations of 195 governors, event history models are employed to show that affiliation with a party represented in the executive (the government or the presidency) has a large and significant positive effect on governor survival. However, affiliation with an opposition party only increases governors' hazards during the first four years of their term, suggesting that the impact of the party label may be overridden as more reliable information about a governor becomes available.

Why are some countries able to defend their currencies when there are speculative attacks, while others fail to do so and devalue their currencies? This article suggests that intragovernment factors as well as government‐legislature relations should be considered because many of the policy responses to speculative attacks do not require legislative acquiescence, so that intragovernment attributes will have more substantial effects on the policy responses than those of government‐legislature relations. This article suggests that cleavages within government and its instability have a negative effect on decisiveness. Data regarding speculative attacks in developed countries from the 1970s to the 1990s and the Heckman selection model show that governments with many veto players and with less durability have had difficulty in defending their currencies in the face of speculative attacks. The article also finds that governmental institutional effects can be constrained by central bank independence. The effects become substantially smaller and statistically insignificant when central banks are very independent. The overall results imply that policy indecisiveness induced by some political factors makes governments less able to adopt a new policy equilibrium that is necessary to respond to an exogenous shock such as speculative attack.

Previous studies comparing ideological groups have been restricted to tests of between‐group differences in the means of relevant political psychological variables, thereby neglecting group differences in the variances, meanings and nomological networks of the tested variables. A first exploratory study used data from the European Social Survey (N = 7,314) comparing groups of political party members on the basis of their scores on a self‐placement left–right scale. The second study (N = 69) constituted an in‐depth test for the presence of differences between samples of political activists of moderate parties, communists, anarchists and right‐wing extremists. The results revealed that there is a fair amount of heterogeneity within left‐wing and right‐wing extremists, indicating a substantial amount of within‐group variance of social attitudes, values and prejudice. Moreover, the extremist ideologies are best approached as distinct ideologies that cannot be reduced to extreme versions of moderate ideology, and differences in the meanings and nomological networks of the various extremist ideologies were also obtained. It is erroneous to consider members of extremist groups as being ‘all alike’. The findings obtained from samples of political moderates are not a particularly solid basis for theories about extremism.

The policy influence of political parties is a classic subject of investigation in political science research. The typical conclusion is that parties influence policy only through government: The government controls the legislative process and has the parliamentary majority to legislate; the opposition is shut out. Yet the legislative process is merely the final part of a much longer policy process starting with an agenda‐setting phase that decides the issues of political conflict in the first place. This study proposes an agenda‐setting model of opposition policy influence which hypothesises sizable opposition policy influence through agenda‐setting: A government is likely to adopt legislation covering the opposition's position in order to silence opposition agenda‐setting. The model is tested on the manual coding of 316 Acts of Parliament adopted by the government and 26,533 Prime Minister's Questions from the Opposition across six issues in Britain (1979‒2015). The results have important implications for minority representation.

One of the limits of previous studies using respondents’ self‐placements and subjective party placements to examine levels of citizen‐government congruence is that they were limited to the post‐1995 period. This article extends the number of elections where it is possible to examine levels of citizen‐government ideological congruence with a survey‐based approach. In particular, a unique dataset has been collected that combines data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and several national election studies. The results confirm recent studies that show that levels of citizen‐government ideological congruence are similar under majoritarian and proportional representation (PR) systems. Such studies, however, did not provide evidence that congruence is maintained over the course of a government's mandate. This article introduces, therefore, two measures of citizen‐government congruence that address this issue and that may revive the debate about which electoral systems strengthen the citizen‐government connection: citizen‐government congruence at the end of government mandates and change in congruence between elections. The results indicate that governments stay closer to the median citizens between elections under PR systems than under majoritarian systems. It is found, however, that this decrease in congruence in majoritarian systems is not detrimental to the point of observing smaller levels of congruence at the end of government mandates under majoritarian systems than under PR systems.

A joint Senate-Chamber special ‘political renewal’ committee was installed in order to discuss and put forward reforms of the electoral system, the introduction of instruments of direct democracy, etc. It established a very long list of possible reforms, and the discussions evolved quite slowly. In the meantime, the government decided, on its own, to implement a 50% reduction of the weight of list votes in determining the order in which individual candidates from the list are to be elected for elections at all levels. This reform was the result of a compromise between the Liberals, who wanted a more drastic reform, and the Socialists and Greens who were not clearly in favour of such a reform. The distinction between effective and substitute candidates’ lists was also abandoned. This reform was first implemented for the October local elections. The Council of Ministers also put forward a constitutional reform ensuring the presence of at least one member of each gender in the federal and subnational Cabinets.

Environmental issues are an important aspect of party competition and voters’ political preferences. Yet political behaviour research often considers environmental attitudes as a component of a broader ‘second-dimension’ and either subsumes it into this or omits it. Using data from the fifth wave of the European Values Study, we demonstrate through factor analysis that environmentalism loads as a separate dimension across Western Europe, that environmentalism has somewhat different social predictors and that it has important associations with party preference that differ from those of other second dimension issues. Our findings have crucial implications. Firstly, not accounting for environmentalism in studies of political behaviour misses an important part of the picture. Secondly, subsuming environmentalism into a broader ‘cultural’ dimension may lead to incomplete conclusions about both social predictors and the electoral consequences of political attitudes and values. Thus, allowing for a separate environmental dimension opens up novel perspectives on political representation in Western democracies.

Coalition policymaking concerns not only who decides what in which jurisdiction but also when, how speedy and in what rhythm. Due to the limited time budget and shadow of future elections, parties in charge of respective ministerial portfolios have to strategically organize their policy agendas to trade off between policy and electoral incentives in the face of coalition partners who monitor and control ministerial autonomy. However, despite the burgeoning literature on coalition governance, the temporal dimension of ministerial agenda control is less well understood. I advance this research by proposing a model to directly account for the influence of time budgets on timing decisions of ministers in policy initiation. In this model, I distinguish between different timing strategies of policy initiation a ministerial party may possibly adopt and identify in equilibrium a conditional postponing strategy by which ministers facing high scrutiny of coalition partners will postpone bill initiation till the end of the term. The empirical examination lends support to my argument and further demonstrates that the timing strategy of ministers can also be influenced by coalition conflict and policy saliency of bills.

Several scholars in the United States have recently addressed an increased partisan animosity between Democrats and Republicans, and have termed this phenomenon ‘affective polarisation’. This surge in partisan affective polarisation is perceived to be highly problematic, as it has been found to have a negative impact on the functioning of the party system and even society at large. The aim of this article is to study the concept of affective polarisation in European party systems. It introduces the Affective Polarisation Index (API) that allows for measuring and comparing levels of affective polarisation also in multiparty systems. This novel measure is applied to 22 European democracies and the United States between 2005 and 2016. The results indicate that affective polarisation is acutely present in European party systems, as partisans are often extremely hostile towards competing parties. The most affectively polarised countries are in Central Eastern and Southern Europe where the degree of affective polarisation is notably higher than it is in the United States, while Northwestern European countries are more moderate in terms of partisan feelings. Further analysis reveals that affective polarisation is significantly correlated with ideological polarisation, but the relationship between the two appears to be conditional: in some Western European political systems ideological polarisation does not lead itself to strong interparty hostility, while in Central Eastern Europe a high degree of affective polarisation can be present even in ideologically centrist party structures. These findings validate the claim that ideological and affective polarisation are two distinct aspects of polarisation, and that the latter also merits additional attention.

Members of ethnic and racial minorities across North America and Europe continue to face discrimination, for instance, when applying for jobs or seeking housing. Such unequal treatment can occur because societies categorize people into groups along social, cultural, or ethnic and racial lines that seemingly rationalize differential treatment. Research suggests that it may take generations for such differences to decline, if they change at all. Here, we show that a single gesture by international soccer players at the World Cup 2018 – followed by an extensive public debate – led to a measurable and lasting decline in discrimination. Immediately after the galvanizing event, invitation rates to view apartments increased by 6 percentage points for the migrant group represented by the players, while responses to the native population did not change noticeably. We demonstrate that anti‐immigrant behaviour can disband rapidly when the public receives messages challenging the nature of ethnic and racial categories while sharing a common cause.

Women are not a demographic minority, but they certainly are a minority in politics. Most legislative bodies across the world are still overwhelmingly male. Female candidates cite lack of resources as one of the main deterrents to run. Using data on candidates encompassing twenty‐eight elections in sixteen countries between 2006 and 2017, we examine the role of electoral institutions, partisanship and candidates’ political profile in mitigating – or aggravating – the gender resource gap. We find that female candidates systematically avail of significantly lower campaign budgets. This is true across different electoral systems and on the left as well as on the right. The gap is larger in size among incumbents. It is also wider in parties that use voluntary quotas and put forward more female candidates. Moreover, the budget composition of male and female candidates varies considerably. Male candidates tend to use higher proportions of their own resources, while female candidates rely on proportionally higher party contributions, that are, however, smaller in size.

Recent research suggests that emotions are a central motivation for radical right voting. One emotion that has gained particular interest is nostalgia: Radical right politicians use nostalgic rhetoric, and feeling nostalgic is associated with radical right support. However, while nostalgia is widely and frequently experienced, previous work differentiates personal contents of nostalgia (e.g., childhood) from group‐based contents (e.g., traditions) and suggests that only the latter is related to the radical right. But why does nostalgia, and specifically its group‐based content, matter? In the present paper, I argue that nostalgia evokes implicit comparisons between the past and the present. Using relative deprivation theory, I posit that group‐based nostalgia makes people subjectively evaluate society's present as worse than its past. In turn, this temporal group‐based relative deprivation is associated with attempts to restore the past through radical right voting. Personal nostalgia, instead, does not evoke equivalent experiences of personal relative deprivation and is, therefore, unrelated to radical right support. In preregistered analyses of representative panel data from the Netherlands, I show that group‐based nostalgia is more consistently related to radical right support than personal nostalgia. In subsequent exploratory analyses, I test the relative deprivation argument and find that group‐based relative deprivation does indeed mediate the relationship between group‐based nostalgia and radical right voting: People who long for the group‐based past are more likely to feel dissatisfied with the government and, in turn, consider voting for the radical right. In studying this mechanism, I connect recent work on emotional and relative deprivation explanations to radical right voting.