How does the educational divide impact contemporary redistributive politics in the knowledge economy? Traditional political economy models which see education as a labour market asset predict the relatively secure educated will oppose redistribution, while the precarious less‐educated will support it. In contrast, a conception of education as a marker of social status suggests that the less‐educated may be more inclined than status‐secure university graduates to draw harsh boundaries against welfare state beneficiaries as a means to maintain social esteem. Building on both theoretical approaches, I analyze 2016 European Social Survey data from 15 Western European countries. I find that education has a negative relationship to support for an expansive welfare state. By contrast, education is strongly positively associated with perceptions of welfare state beneficiaries as deserving.

This has implications for education as a structural divide in electoral politics. Evidence that attitudes towards the scope of the welfare state mediate the effects of education on vote choice is mixed. However, KHB mediation analyses decomposing the effects of education on vote choice reveal that deservingness perceptions are a particularly substantial mediator of education effects on voting for radical right and green parties. This explains in part why these parties represent the poles of the educational divide, whose attitudinal basis is usually understood to be socio‐cultural rather than redistributive.

The mass media is conventionally assumed to play an important role in welfare state politics. So far, however, we have very little systematic theorizing or empirical evidence of when and how the mass media reports on welfare state reforms. Building on news value theory and the welfare state reform literature, we develop a set of hypotheses about mass media reporting on welfare state reforms. We argue that mass media attention is conditioned not only by the direction of reforms, with cuts getting more attention than expansions, but also by the election platform that the incumbent party ran on in the last election as well as by the policy reputation of the government. Drawing on a new dataset including about 4,800 news articles in British, Danish and German quality newspapers from 1995 to 2014, we find supporting empirical evidence of our expectations.

Government responsiveness is a key feature and justification for democracy. Yet, previous studies show that the ability of governments to deliver responsive policies critically depends on the availability of resources. This study suggests that the shadow economy hurts democratic responsiveness because it reduces government revenues and decreases the reliability of economic statistics. Governments facing lower resources then respond to wider economic constraints and not to their publics. Using Eurobarometer data to evaluate public opinion in 15 European democracies and data on welfare generosity to measure policy outputs, this study finds that larger submerged economies correspond to less responsive governments. Additionally, the empirical analysis highlights that the shadow economy makes welfare systems less generous and taxation rates more demanding. These novel results have important implications for our understanding of democracy and help us clarify the conditions under which governments are more or less likely to deliver responsive policies. Finally, these results demonstrate the importance of studying the political consequences of the shadow economy.

We analyse the impact of International Monetary Fund (IMF) programmes on appointing women leaders in ministerial positions. We hypothesize that women leaders are selected after an incumbent government starts an IMF programme to shift accountability to them during political and economic turmoil. This political manoeuvring of appointing women to leadership positions during a crisis is known as the ‘glass cliff’ effect. We demonstrate substantial evidence for such a ‘glass cliff’ effect using data covering all IMF programmes from 1980 to 2018. Our evidence shows that women are more likely to be appointed to austerity‐bearing ministerial positions under IMF programmes but not in positions of authority during negotiations with the IMF. This effect is more pronounced when a country displays worse societal gender norms, a higher level of corruption and a government facing a deeper economic crisis. Importantly, we verify that neither women's leadership nor a higher share of women in government predicts a balance of payments crisis triggering an IMF programme. In other words, women leaders do not govern worse; they are appointed to leadership positions in precarious, crisis‐ridden conditions.

The elections to the European Parliament on 13 June were clearly treated as secondary by the political parties, compared to the elections to the national parliament due on 3 October. As in the 1996 elections (see Political Data Yearbook 1997), nearly all parties tried to present well-known faces, rather than experienced politicians, at the top of their lists of candidates. The SPÖ, on the advice of party chairman and Chancellor Viktor Klima, chose a journalist and non-party member, Hans-Peter Martin. The choice disappointed the party base and especially the Viennese party organisation, which had proposed the present leader of the SPÖ delegation, MEP Hannes Swoboda, who was only ranked fourth on the SPÖ list. As a reaction, the Viennese party initiated a preference voting campaign for Swoboda (and following the elections, the SPÖ delegation relegated its top candidate to the second rank and re-elected its previous leader).

The global increase in extreme weather events in recent years has spurred political scientists to examine the potential political effects of such phenomena. This paper explores effect of flooding on electoral outcomes and offers evidence that the impact of adverse events varies with changes in political context. Using a difference-in-differences identification strategy to analyse three consecutive general elections in the United Kingdom (2015, 2017 and 2019), the paper finds variability in partisan electoral benefit from one election to the next that calls into question the blind retrospection and rally-round-the-leader explanations which are often advanced to account for electoral reactions to natural disasters. Instead, changing party positions on environmental issues appear to account more convincingly for shifts in electoral support in response to flooding. This suggests that parties can derive benefit from, or be punished for, the positions they take on environmental issues when extreme weather events affect citizens.

The relevance of the macro‐context for understanding political trust has been widely studied in recent decades, with increasing attention paid to micro–macro level interactive relationships. Most of these studies rely on theorising about evaluation based on the quality of representation, stressing that more‐educated citizens are most trusting of politics in countries with the least corrupt public domains. In our internationally comparative study, we add to the micro–macro interactive approach by theorising and testing an additional way in which the national context is associated with individual‐level political trust, namely evaluation based on substantive representation. The relevance of both types of evaluation is tested by modelling not only macro‐level corruption but also context indicators of the ideological stances of the governing cabinet (i.e., the level of its economic egalitarianism and cultural liberalism), and interacting these with individual‐level education, economic egalitarianism and cultural liberalism, respectively. As we measure context characteristics separately from people's ideological preferences, we are able to dissect how the macro‐context relates to the levels of political trust of different subgroups differently. Data from three waves (2006, 2010, 2014) of the European Social Survey (68,294 respondents in 24 European countries and 62 country‐year combinations), enriched with country‐level data derived from various sources, including the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, are used in the multi‐level regression analyses employed to test our hypotheses. We found support for the micro–macro level interactions theorised by the evaluation based on the quality of representation approach (with higher levels of trust among more‐educated citizens in less corrupt countries), as well as for evaluation based on substantive representation in relation to cultural issues (with higher levels of trust among more culturally liberal citizens in countries with more culturally liberal governing cabinets). Our findings indicate that the latter approach is at least equally relevant as the approach conventionally used to explain context differences in political trust. Finally, we conclude our study with a discussion of our findings and avenues for future research.

What makes some challenger parties succeed and others fail? Existing research on party‐level factors finds that it is essential for parties to close a representational gap. However, this condition cannot be sufficient. For each successful challenger, there are many others proclaiming a similar message but going unheard. Hence, we argue that, instead of only to the messages, more attention should be paid to parties’ abilities to communicate their messages effectively.

Using an original dataset on 74 challenger parties in five countries in a similar political and economic situation (during the post‐2008 economic crisis), we show that communication is key for electoral success. In particular, we show that challenger parties can win over voters by, on the one hand, harnessing the prominence of a well‐known personality (a locomotive) and by, on the other hand, establishing a means of contacting voters which bypasses the traditional news media and amplifies their message (like a megaphone). But this megaphone only works if it amplifies a message that fills a representational gap (here: an anti‐austerity message) – only then do parties benefit. Furthermore, we provide evidence for the widespread but unproven claim that populism helps challenger parties succeed, but this, too, depends on whether parties are able to contact voters on a large scale.

By including three crucial aspects of communication (sender, channel, and message), we can explain a large share of the high variability in challenger party success.

The level of congruence between parties and their voters can vary greatly from one policy issue to another, which raises questions regarding the effectiveness of political representation. We seek to explain variation in party–voter congruence across issues and parties. We focus on the hypotheses that (1) average proximity between the positions of voters and the party they vote for will be highest on the issues that the party emphasises in the election campaign and that (2) this relationship will be stronger for niche parties. We test these hypotheses using data on the policy preferences of voters, party positions, party attention profiles and salience on concrete policy issues in four countries: The Netherlands, Ireland, Germany and Sweden. Overall, we find that voter–party proximity tends to be higher on issues that the party emphasises. As these are the issues where parties typically have the greatest policy impact, this implies that the quality of representation is highest where it matters most. There is some limited evidence that the positive relationship between issue salience and proximity is stronger for niche parties. In sum, the quality of policy representation varies strongly with party‐level issue salience and to a lesser extent with the type of political party.

Scholarly interest in political secularism is currently growing. Political secularism is not the absence of religious belief, membership or practice, but the conviction that politics and religion should be kept separate and that religious arguments should have no standing in political debates. Little is known about the roots of this attitude, particularly outside the United States. This is unfortunate because politically secular attitudes strongly affect citizens' views on so‐called morality policies (e.g. the regulation of abortion, assisted suicide or experiments with stem cells) which are often highly controversial.

In this research note, I focus on the link between political secularism and basic human values. From Schwartz's own work and from the extant literature on religion, secularism and basic human values, I derive two hypotheses: self‐direction should be linked to higher levels, and tradition should be linked to lower levels of political secularism.

Multivariate analysis of current survey data from Germany, a prototypical ‘religious‐world country’, supports both hypotheses. Crucially, the relationships hold when controlling for three main facets of religion, for region (east vs west), and for socio‐demographics. The results show that net of their well‐documented association with religion, basic human values contribute to our understanding of political secularism. More generally, the findings demonstrate once more the impact of basic human values on all areas of political life.

This article investigates the revolving doors phenomenon in the European Union (EU). It proposes a management approach that treats this phenomenon as a form of corporate political activity through which companies try to gain access to decision makers. By using sequence analysis to examine the career paths of almost 300 EU affairs managers based in public and private companies across 26 countries, three different ideal‐typical managers are identified: those EU affairs managers coming from EU institutions and public affairs; those who make a career through the private sector; and those who establish themselves in national political institutions. This identification confirms that EU institutions need different types of information and companies need EU affairs managers with different professional backgrounds able to provide it. Rather than observing a revolving door of EU officials into EU government affairs, what the authors term ‘sliding doors’ – namely the separation of careers, especially between the public and private sectors – is discerned.

Political representation does not function well for citizens whose positions on political issues differ from those of elected representatives. In this paper, we argue that opinion incongruence leads citizens to want to bypass elected representatives and place more decision‐making power in the hands of the public. We theorise that this is because incongruent citizens are highly dissatisfied with the existing political system and/or think they will benefit from direct decision‐making in terms of improved policy responsiveness. Using data from the 2019 Belgian Election Survey (n = 3413) and Party Leadership Survey, we find that greater incongruence between citizens’ positions and those of their elected representatives is related to higher support for direct decision‐making. This holds for opinion incongruence with the party voted for and incongruence with Parliament as a whole. This paper contributes novel insights into the consequences of the quality of political representation as well as the drivers of citizens’ support for direct decision‐making processes.

This paper estimates the scarring effect of recessions on corporates’ investment and how it is amplified by the level of corporate debt. Our results suggest that the effect of firms’ debt in shaping the response of investment to recessions is statistically significant and economically sizeable, with high-debt firms seeing a larger decline in investment. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that firms’ debt accounts for at least 28% of the average medium-term decline of investment. This effect is especially larger for: (i) countries with less efficient bankruptcy systems; (ii) during global recessions and firms operating in sectors with higher export dependences; and (iii) firms that are credit-constrained—small and less profitable firms, and those with high share of short-term debt.

Depression is the most common mental illness and its profound impact on cognition and decision‐making has implications for political judgement. However, those implications are unclear in the case of referendums offering a choice between status quo and change. On one hand, one component of depression is the kind of life dissatisfaction associated with voting for change. Yet cognitive models also portray depression sufferers as biased towards the status quo: they are less inclined to research change, more pessimistic about its benefits and more likely to exaggerate its potential costs. In this paper, we use data from Understanding Society to examine the impact of those cross‐pressures on support for Brexit. Prior to the referendum, while life dissatisfaction and generally poor health predicted support for Leaving the European Union (EU), those diagnosed with depression were disproportionately likely to support Remain. Supporting our claim that the latter was a sign of status quo bias, this difference disappeared once the result was in and leaving the EU had become the widespread expectation. The study highlights the unexplored importance of mental health for political judgements, emphasises the multidimensionality of conditions like depression and illustrates the psychological role of status quo bias in referendum voting.