How do people perceive the utility of redistribution? Support for redistribution is commonly understood as being determined by self‐interest in a way that is monotonically proportional to expected net transfers. However, this would imply that average support for redistribution is static and unaffected by changes in the distribution of incomes. This study addresses this incongruence by integrating concepts from the literature on redistribution preferences, namely the diminishing marginal utility of income, inequity aversion and loss aversion. These concepts are formalized by making two distinctions regarding redistribution: absolute versus relative utility and gains versus losses. An analysis of the European/World Values Survey suggests that the preferences of the poor are determined by absolute gains, while the preferences of the rich are determined by relative losses. In other words, the poor care about how much they gain from redistribution, while the rich care about the share of their income that they lose from it. The findings have important implications for the relationships among public opinion, economic development and income inequality.

Growing evidence exists about the importance of dark personality traits – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in political leaders, broadly leading to heightened political aggressiveness and partisan conflict. Building on this expanding research agenda, we study the possible association between dark personality in politicians and deepened affective polarization – that is, increased affective distance between partisan groups coupled with stronger dislike for out‐parties – in the public. We do so by linking a large‐scale expert survey (NEGex) and a collection of post‐election surveys (CSES), including information for more than 90 leading candidates having competed in 40 elections worldwide. Our results show that the dark personality of top politicians can be associated with upticks in affective polarization in the public – but only when it comes to the personality of in‐party candidates (that is, a candidate from voters' preferred party), and only for high levels of ideological proximity between the candidate and the voter.

The EU has become increasingly responsible for the state of national economies over the last decades. Meanwhile, many observers have claimed that this increased responsibility has not translated into more accountability. In this article, we revisit this literature and analyse vote‐popularity functions before and after accession because it provides a situation when the EU is an incumbent and when it is not. Using Eurobarometer surveys from 2001 to 2011, which were carried out in the countries that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007, we first show that individuals do not hold the EU accountable for macroeconomic performances before accession, but that they do after accession. Using European Election Studies surveys, we also indicate that the incumbent European Peoples’ Party is held accountable for the state of the economy in countries that are ruled by the EU, but not in countries that have just become EU members.

Notwithstanding the improvement in gender equality in political power and resources in European democracies, this study shows that, on average, declared interest in politics is 16 per cent lower for women than for men in Europe. This gap remains even after controlling for differences in men's and women's educational attainment, material and cognitive resources. Drawing on the newly developed European Institute for Gender Equality's (EIGE) Gender Equality Index (GEI) and on the European Social Survey (ESS) fifth wave, we show that promoting gender equality contributes towards narrowing the magnitude of the differences in political interest between men and women. However, this effect appears to be conditioned by the age of citizens. More specifically, findings show that in Europe gender‐friendly policies contribute to bridging the gender gap in political engagement only during adulthood, suggesting that childhood socialisation is more strongly affected by traditional family values than by policies promoting gender equality. In contrast, feminising social citizenship does make a difference by reducing the situational disadvantages traditionally faced by women within the family and in society for middle‐aged people and older.

Political parties have an electoral incentive to appear ideologically unified, but also to appeal broadly to different groups of voters with diverse preferences. This paper suggests that parties respond to both incentives through the distribution of candidate issue positions. Members of Parliament (MPs) are responsible for their party's national reputation and thus rarely take positions that diverge from those of their party. Non‐incumbent candidates, on the other hand, are mostly visible within their electoral district and thus more likely to diverge from party positions that are unpopular among their constituents. These possibilities are tested with candidate position taking data from nine voting advice applications in Denmark, Finland, Ireland and Switzerland. The results are consistent with the theoretical expectations and have important implications for the way representation works in parliamentary democracies as well as for the broader literature on the topic.

Political choice is central to citizens’ participation in elections. Nonetheless, little is known about the individual‐level mechanisms that link political choice and turnout. It is argued in this article that turnout decisions are shaped not only by the differences between the parties (party polarisation), but also by the closeness of parties to citizens’ own ideological position (congruence), and that congruence matters more in polarised systems where more is at stake. Analysing cross‐national survey data from 80 elections, it is found that both polarisation and congruence have a mobilising effect, but that polarisation moderates the effect of congruence on turnout. To further explore the causal effect of political choice, the arrival of a new radical right‐wing party in Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), is leveraged and the findings show that the presence of the AfD had a mobilising effect, especially for citizens with congruent views.

This Research Note presents a new dataset of party patronage in 22 countries from five regions. The data was collected using the same methodology to compare patterns of patronage within countries, across countries and across world regions that are usually studied separately. The Note addresses three research questions that are at the centre of debates on party patronage, which is understood as the power of political parties to make appointments to the public and semi‐public sector: the scope of patronage, the underlying motivations and the criteria on the basis of which appointees are selected. The exploration of the dataset shows that party patronage is, to a different degree, widespread across all regions. The data further shows differences between policy areas, types of institutions such as government ministries, agencies and state‐owned enterprises, and higher, middle and lower ranks of the bureaucracy. It is demonstrated that the political control of policy making and implementation is the most common motivation for making political appointments. However, in countries with a large scope of patronage, appointments serve the purpose of both political control and rewarding supporters in exchange for votes and services. Finally, the data shows that parties prefer to select appointees who are characterised by political and personal loyalty as well as professional competence.

Do attacks against politicians exacerbate the political underrepresentation of marginalized groups? Existing research suggests that candidates and officeholders from underrepresented groups are more likely to become targets of political violence, but little is known about the consequences of indirect exposure to political violence for descriptive representation and political ambition. Focusing on the case of women in politics, we study how the prevalence of political violence affects both the descriptive representation and the political ambition of women in Germany – Europe's largest democracy. Combining an analysis of observational data measuring crimes against politicians with evidence from original and pre‐registered survey experiments, we first demonstrate that attacks on political elites are not associated with fewer female candidates on party lists for local elections. Examining political ambitions and underlying microfoundations with different samples of respondents varying in their likelihood of considering political candidacy, we provide survey‐experimental evidence that information about the prevalence of political crime does not reduce willingness to run for office or engage in politics among female respondents with high political interest but may do so among those with low political interest. Taken together, this study highlights the resilience of underrepresented groups in the face of increasing political violence. However, we also show that political violence may create a pipeline problem if it deters the wider population of women from even considering to run for office.

Transport Minister Gabriel Palacka resigned on 12 August 1999, and was replaced by Jozef Macejko (1958 male, SDK–KDH). Palacka resigned because of public and intracoalitional pressure in connection with several accusations of economic clientelism that did not shed a positive light on the cabinet. Economy minister L’udovít Černák also resigned after pressure from within the coalition for reasons as Palacka. He resigned on 19 October 1999, and was replaced on 21 October 1999 by Lubomír Harach (1953 male, SDK–DU).

A plethora of accumulating crises, and the public frustration with how they were tackled, have provided fertile ground for growing public scepticism towards the European Union (EU). The way in which political leaders manage these crises may well decide the future of the EU. Research has addressed these developments comprehensively. However, it has not, to date, provided an adequate analytical lens to confront the crisis theme explicitly and therefore needs analytical advancement. We contribute to the debate by developing a framework for comparative analysis and evaluation of public political crisis communication, identifying four aspects along which public political crisis communication can be analysed: (1) how accessible it is, (2) how well it can contribute to allaying fears, (3) to what extent it accommodates public concerns, and (4) how politically aligned crisis managers are in their communication. We analyse a dataset of 10 years of speeches and press releases of the governments of Austria, Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom in addition to the EU's executive institutions (EU Commission and Councils). Drawing on different approaches to automated text analysis, we score texts on the four identified dimensions and draw dimensions together in a holistic similarity index. Results demonstrate the cohesion of crisis‐relevant communication in contrast to non‐relevant communication. They also show that accommodation, is consistently emphasised more in crisis than in non‐crisis communication; however, political crisis managers have practiced a politics of fear rather than allaying concerns, potentially fuelling political frustration and disenchantment. In addition, the EU's crisis communication is not found to be different from communication about non‐crisis topics, opening up avenues for future research concerned with legitimation processes at different political levels. Overall, the results do partly resonate with the insights provided by the existing literature but also shine a new, holistic light on how political executives have managed crises in the past decade.

Multinational corporations can play off host governments to minimise their tax payments in the absence of internationally coordinated fiscal policies. Without a supranational enforcement agency, most tax harmonization policies are unstable because one or another signatory always has an incentive to break ranks. This produces a sub-optimal tax harvest for a group of host governments taken as a whole. This is a collective action problem for host governments which can be stated in the form of a Prisoner's Dilemma supergame. Equilibrium cooperative solutions have been suggested for this game which do not need higher authorities to enforce them. The application of these solutions to the host governments’ tax problem is discussed, with the conclusion that under certain conditions self-policing tax harmonization agreements are possible.

A certain type of citizen holds technocratic views. They favour pragmatic problem solving through scientific and technical expertise, and reject party politics for being harmful to the common good. Yet, empirical evidence on the ideological profile of these citizens is fragmented and inconclusive. Using an original survey in Western Europe, Australia and the United States, we test predictions about the left−right alignment of citizens with technocratic attitudes on the economic and cultural dimensions of politics. We argue that technocracy is not antithetical to ideology and that citizens holding technocratic attitudes are not immune to ideological positions. Findings show that technocratic citizens are more economically left-wing than mainstream voters, contrary to common associations of technocracy with neoliberal economic principles. However, they are more centrist than populists. This highlights that, in addition to a representational challenge, technocracy mounts an ideological challenge to party-based representative democracy. In times of cumulative crises, which put democracies under stress with demands for competence and effectiveness, these findings offer insights about the appeal of alternative forms of representation.

Some scholars and policy makers argue in favour of increasing democratic contestation for leadership and policy at the European level, for instance by having European‐wide parties campaign for competing candidates for President of the European Commission ahead of European Parliament elections. But do such changes put the survival of the European Union at risk? According to the consociational interpretation of the EU, the near absence of competitive and majoritarian elements has been a necessary condition for the stability of the EU political system given its highly diverse population. This article contributes to the debate in two ways. First, it develops a more precise understanding of ‘problematic’ diversity by examining how three variables – the heterogeneity, polarisation and crosscuttingness of citizen preferences over public polices – affect the risk of democratic contestation generating persistent and systematically dissatisfied minorities. Second, it uses opinion surveys to determine whether the degree of diversity of the European population is problematically high compared to that of established democratic states. It is found that the population of the EU is slightly more heterogeneous and polarised than the population of the average Member State, although policy preferences in several Member States are more heterogeneous and polarised than the EU as a whole. Strikingly, however, policy preference cleavages are more crosscutting in the EU than in nearly all Member States, reducing the risk of persistent minorities. Moreover, policy preferences tend to be less heterogeneous and polarised, and nearly as crosscutting, in the EU as a whole as in the United States. For observers worried about how high polarisation and low crosscuttingness in policy preferences may combine to threaten democratic stability, these findings should be reassuring.

Do individuals with right‐wing populist ideologies have higher violence‐justification attitudes than those supporting different political ideologies? While the literature has confirmed the association between political violence and populism, research on which components of populist ideologies relate to individual attitudes towards political violence is relatively scarce. Based on 18 European democracies, this research note examines whether right‐wing populist individuals are more likely to justify political violence to pursue their political goals. The analyses reveal that right‐wing populists are generally more likely to justify political violence compared to mainstream voters and non‐voters. Additionally, left‐wing populist voters also support political violence, although the effect size is comparatively smaller. This indicates that voters’ radicalisation depends on populist ideologies rather than left‐right ideological distinctions. The effect among right‐wing populists depends on city residence, gender and immigration status. Subsequent analyses suggest that right‐wing populists’ attitudes towards violence are not conditional on nativism or anti‐immigration perceptions. These findings contribute to the general understanding of the nature and consequences of populism.