In contrast to 1999, in which the Kosovo crisis and the election of the European Parliament imposed some commonality on politics, at least within the NATO and EU member states, the year 2000 was characterized by important, but largely unrelated, political events in the 28 countries reviewed in this issue. There were, however, several exceptions to this pattern of national idiosyncrasy.

This study presents the results from a series of conjoint experiments evaluating how the various components of political systems affect citizens’ satisfaction with democracy (SWD). Compared to earlier studies, our approach is unique in that we were able to disentangle the effects of otherwise highly collinear variables corresponding to three defining features of any political system, namely (1) access to power, (2) the policy‐making process and (3) performance. We fielded identical conjoint experiments in countries with significant variations across the key independent variables: France, Hungary and Italy. Overall, our study supports the view that citizens are more satisfied with democracy in consensus systems than in majoritarian democracies, while it also contributes to identifying the respective weight of the specific components of political systems. Respondents across all countries recognize that proportionality and party system fragmentation magnify their voices by creating a more representative political climate. With regard to output legitimacy, we find that respondents identify good economic performance and public probity as important features of a well‐performing democracy. The positive effect of the legislators’ constituency orientation on SWD is a particularly noteworthy result that is currently understudied in the literature. Moreover, the state of the economy has by far the biggest impact on SWD, which indicates a highly materialistic view of democracy in all three countries.

What impact has the 2004 enlargement had on legislative decision making in the European Union (EU)? This study answers this question by examining the controversies raised by a broad selection of legislative proposals from before and after the 2004 enlargement. The analyses focus on the alignments of decision‐making actors found on those controversies. Member State representatives, the European Commission and the European Parliament vary considerably in the positions they take on controversial issues before and after enlargement. Consistent patterns in actor alignments are found for only a minority of controversial issues. To the extent that consistent patterns are found, the most common involve differences in the positions of Northern and Southern Member States and old and new Member States. The North‐South alignment was more common in the EU‐15 and reflected Northern Member States' preference for low levels of regulatory intervention. The new‐old alignment that has been evident in the post‐2004 EU reflects new Member States' preference for higher levels of financial subsidies. This study argues that the persistent diversity in actor alignments contributes to the EU's capacity to cope with enlargement.

Online abuse is becoming an increasingly pressing issue for democratic societies. Citizens play an important role in curtailing abuse as they often moderate online content through counter speech and by reporting abusive messages. However, we know little about when citizens actually perceive negative comments directed at politicians as being abusive, and the factors shaping these perceptions are also understudied. In this study, we therefore investigate how citizens perceive criticism, insults, threats and sexist remarks directed at politicians on social media. Based on a survey experiment with 2,000 Danish citizens, we show that citizens’ assessments of the abusiveness of such remarks are not only affected by the content of the messages, but also by political ideology, political trust and gender. Surprisingly, partisanship does not seem to substantively affect perceptions of abuse. Our study provides novel insights into what exactly citizens consider to be abusive behaviour on social media.

The year 2000 in Swedish politics could be described as relatively quiet. Despite one significant ministerial casualty, the minority Social Democratic government stayed in office. The political temperature was medium to low, in part because no elections were held and the next parliamentary election is scheduled for September 2002.

The main issues dominating national politics during 1999 were yet another leadership change in the Conservative People’s Party, the internal struggle for power in the Progress Party resulting in the return of the founder of the party, Mogens Glistrup, as de facto leader of the party with his old position as campaign leader, the election to the European Parliament and finally the passing of the annual state budget.

Family‐friendly practices in parliaments are central to the recruitment and retention of diverse representatives. Yet, instituting such reforms raises questions about public reactions, something little tested in current work. A conjoint experiment in the United Kingdom tests if the public punish MPs for taking time off their elected roles for a baby. And, importantly, asks who pays the price? Against expectations, MPs who take parental leave are not punished by the public. Voters prefer MPs who are parents, even when they take leave. Crucially, this preference is contingent upon MP sex. Women MPs who take parental leave are consistently the preferred choice over their male counterparts. When the ‘costs’ of parenthood are emphasised, women MPs receive a parenthood benefit, while men MPs do not. The findings align with the recent positive bias for women in electoral choice experiments and lend further support to implementing family‐friendly policies in politics.

Voters in rural and peripheral areas have increasingly turned away from mainstream parties and towards right‐wing populist parties. This paper tests the extent to which political decisions with adverse local effects—such as school and hospital closures—can explain this electoral shift. I theorize that political decisions such as these substantiate a perception of a disconnect between “ordinary” people and the politicians in power in day‐to‐day experiences. Using data on 315 school closures and 30 hospital closures in Denmark from 2005 to 2019 in a generalized difference‐in‐differences design, I find that mayors lose about 1.6 percentage points of the valid votes in areas where they close a school. Furthermore, I find that right‐wing populist parties increase their support in both local and national elections when a local school or hospital is closed. These findings provide insight into the electoral consequences of political decisions with adverse local effects and thus contribute to our understanding of the rise of right‐wing populism.

Have concerns about equal rights and equal chances crowded out economic equality as a priority of left parties? Despite the increased importance of inequality in political science, this contentiously fought debate has been standing on shaky empirical foundations. While voter's equality preferences are well understood, parties’ equality emphases remain uncharted territory. This research note assesses whether the Left has replaced its emphasis on economic equality with a focus on equal chances and equal rights. Based on a new dataset of 300,000 party statements, we use online crowd‐coding to map the equality trajectories of left parties in 12 OECD countries from 1970 to 2020. We examine if trade‐offs between economic and non‐economic aspects of inequality have come to dominate left parties’ equality profiles. Distinguishing social democratic, green and far‐left parties, we refute a meritocratic or ‘woke’ crowding out of redistribution. Yet, Social Democrats have indeed forsaken the once complementary link between economic equality and equal rights in favour of a weak trade‐off.

The huge quantitative literature on postwar social spending almost entirely neglected war as a possible explanatory factor of social spending dynamics. Given the mass carnage and the enormous social needs caused by the Second World War, this is quite astonishing. This article examines for the first time, whether, and in what ways, the Second World War affected cross‐national differences in public social spending of 18 Western welfare states over the course of the Golden Age. Using panel regressions, it is found that the war strongly affected social spending until the late 1960s. The evidence demonstrates that the Second World War is not simply a temporal watershed structuring different phases of welfare state development, but rather a crucial factor for understanding cross‐national differences in welfare efforts and social expenditure dynamics in the postwar period.

Many scholars have investigated the relationship between ideological orientations and mass participation, and there is also a growing number of studies comparing political attitudes and behaviour between electoral winners and losers. This article seeks to bring together these two strands of literature with respect to political participation, focusing on the interaction between citizens’ winner/loser status and ideological distance from their government. Analysis of data from 34 countries highlights the importance of this interactive effect: while previous works suggest that losers have a greater propensity to take part in political activities, it is shown here that this relationship holds true only when losers occupy a position along the left‐right spectrum distant from the government. Furthermore, while the hypothesised interactive effect is empirically confirmed for turnout, the magnitude of its impact is much greater for more costly modes of participation such as contacting, campaigning and protesting

The climate crisis looms but support for fuel taxation is low. How to boost support? The obvious way is to make the connection to the climate crisis explicit. Many observers fear, however, that policy myopia renders this strategy ineffective: As the consequences of the climate crisis are long‐term and insecure, people are loath to pay for costly countermeasures in the short term. We look at policy distraction as a second potential drag. We argue that climate crisis‐induced support for fuel taxation can also be undermined by other salient events which divert attention. To test our argument, we conduct a large‐scale survey experiment with more than 21,000 respondents in 17 European countries. Our results show that a simple climate crisis prime raises support for fuel taxation by 12 percentage points. The effect decreases but remains substantial when stressing the long time horizon of the climate crisis. It almost disappears when other current crises (COVID‐19 and Russian military aggression) are mentioned. Thus, distraction by concurrent events is a serious impediment to mobilising support for fuel taxation.