Past research has long documented that voters dislike parties and leaders who reverse their policy positions. But would they tolerate (principled) policy U‐turns if they are motivated by external events, such as a large‐scale crisis or scientific evidence? In this study, we explore whether the motivation behind positional shifts affects voter evaluations of political parties. To do so, we seek to connect the causes and consequences of policy shifts, a synergy still unexplored in the literature. We suggest that, while U‐turns, in general, can be damaging to a party's reputation, principled changes brought about by new scientific evidence or major crises should not necessarily have negative implications, because these changes can be necessary for the public good. We conducted a nationally representative survey experiment in Germany (n = 3127) featuring two classes of policy reversals: strategic and principled. Surprisingly, however, we find that voters by and large hold negative views of different types of policy U‐turns, thus including when external circumstances suggest change may be necessary. Interestingly, our empirical analysis reveals intriguing patterns. First, voters are willing to tolerate all sorts of policy reversals if the party ends up adopting their positions, suggesting that proximity matters even in the event of exogenous events. Second, voters with high levels of political trust tolerate different types of policy reversals, even when the party changes for mere strategic office‐seeking motivations. Coming from the premise that political and societal change is imperative, these findings have direct implications for democracies.

When and why do parliamentary majorities in Europe suppress parliamentary minority rights? This article argues that such reforms are driven by substantive policy conflict in interaction with existing minority rights. Government parties curb minority rights if they fear minority obstruction due to increased policy conflict and a minority‐friendly institutional status quo. Empirical support is found for this claim using comparative data on all reforms in 13 Western European parliaments since 1945. A curbing of minority rights is significantly more likely under conditions of heightened policy conflict and these effects are stronger the more the institutional status quo favours opposition parties. Contrary to frequent claims of consensual rule changes from single‐country studies in Europe, these findings demonstrate the importance of competitive strategies in explaining institutional reform in European parliaments. The conditional impact of the status quo provides interesting theoretical links to historical institutionalist arguments on path dependence.

Political responsiveness is highly unequal along class lines, which has triggered a lively debate about potential causes of this political inequality. What has remained largely unexplored in this debate are the structural economic conditions under which policymakers operate. In this contribution, we hypothesize that budgetary pressures affect both the level and the equality of political responsiveness. Using a dataset containing public opinion data on around 450 fiscal policy proposals in Germany between 1980 and 2016, we investigate whether policymakers are more responsive on issues with budgetary consequences under conditions of low fiscal pressure than under conditions of high fiscal pressure. We find that responsiveness indeed varies systematically with the degree of fiscal pressure and that policymakers are less responsive on fiscal issues when fiscal pressure is high. This holds for both left‐wing and right‐wing governments. In contrast, we do not find strong effects of fiscal pressure on political inequality: responsiveness is not more equal in fiscally more permissive times. However, since different types of policy proposals are adopted in times of high fiscal stress, unequal responsiveness has different policy implications in times of high and low fiscal pressure.

Across countries, young people vote less than older citizens. While a few explanations have been suggested, this paper proposes that one core reason lies in youth under‐representation in partisan politics, in particular as issues such as climate change increase the salience of inter‐generational conflict. I argue that young people are less likely to vote in elections if they do not feel their age represented by candidates. I test this with data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems spanning 223 national elections in 58 countries between 1996 and 2021, combined with data on 980 party leaders and/or presidential candidates in those elections. I find that respondents younger than 30 are up to 4 per cent less likely to vote if the leading candidate of their favourite party is 70 in relation to a leader around 40. However, this effect only appears in more recent years and was nonexistent in the 1990s and early 2000s. Older voters' turnout is unaffected by leaders' and candidates' ages. Two potential mechanisms are the effects of descriptive representation of young voters on their external efficacy and democratic satisfaction. These findings corroborate the possible emergence of age as potential cleavage in contemporary politics and point to an important element of low youth participation as well as to the mobilization potential by parties selecting younger candidates.

Some individuals may compensate for their underlying social cognitive vulnerabilities, therefore exhibiting adaptive real-world social behavior through enhanced attentional mechanisms despite underlying social cognitive challenges. From a developmental psychopathology framework, adaptive behaviors vary dimensionally in the community and across development to promote compensation. Yet, compensation in the broader community of children without categorical clinical diagnoses has not yet been studied. Moreover, the extent to which compensation demonstrates stability versus change is unknown. This study examines childhood social compensation longitudinally in a community-ascertained sample (N = 315) of 7–17 year-old (M = 12.15, SD = 2.97) children (33% non-white, 44% female). Compared to children with equally poor emotion recognition but substantially more real-world social behavior challenges, high compensators demonstrated better attentional alerting (d = 0.81, p < 0.001) without the “cost” of internalizing symptoms. Results showed both stability and instability in compensation group membership over time, with the high compensation group more likely to have unstable classification relative to the no compensation group (OR = 0.26, p = 0.001). Taken together, this study clarifies the processes underlying social compensation in the community and suggests a developmental psychopathology perspective is valuable in understanding how compensation develops across the lifespan. Such work has the potential to inform practices and policies that support social adaptation and promote resilience.

Many theories of political participation imply that close elections increase voter turnout, but empirical support for this is mixed. One challenge is that close elections occur in unrepresentative places, making it difficult to extend counterfactual inferences across the wider electorate. In this note, I study closeness in an alternative way by leveraging those who move home between elections. With a large‐scale longitudinal survey in Great Britain, comparing individuals who move between safe and competitive parliamentary constituencies, I provide evidence that closeness increases campaign contact but generally fails to affect turnout. British movers are politically comparable to the wider electorate, so the results can be cautiously generalised. This contributes to substantive literature on voter and party‐led theories of participation, while adopting an empirical strategy seldom used in the study of political behaviour.

What preferences do people have for cross‐country cooperation on irregular migration and refugee protection? Existing research improves our understanding of how voters react to large‐scale inflows of asylum seekers, like those experienced by European countries in 2015–2016, and the type of asylum seekers and policies preferred by European citizens. We know less, however, about people's views concerning a particular European Union (EU) response to the so‐called ‘refugee crisis’, namely the cooperation with Turkey in March 2016 to stem inflows of asylum seekers and other migrants. To study such views, we build on several strands of the international relations literature exploring key determinants of public preferences for international cooperation on cross‐national issues, namely (a) sociotropic concerns, (b) humanitarian considerations, and (c) perceptions of fairness and reciprocity. Our research design leverages conjoint experiments conducted simultaneously in Germany, Greece and Turkey. We find that the three factors indeed play a role in explaining preferences in the three countries. Moreover, while respondents are favourable to several core features of the current EU–Turkey migration deal (regarding the return of irregular migrants, financial aid to refugees, and border controls), we also find evidence of public support for increased cooperation on resettlement and EU support to Greece to deal with migration, which goes beyond the status quo. In certain aspects of cooperation, public preferences seem to respond to interactions between policy dimensions that capture reciprocity. These findings have important implications for research on public preferences for asylum and migration policies and public support for international cooperation more generally.

That parties fulfil their pre‐election pledges once they are in government is a fundamental idea of many democracy models. This paper addresses the question of whether the government/opposition status of their party affects how much citizens want governments to fulfil their promises. We hypothesize that interest‐driven, rational voters are more likely to prefer their own party to keep its promises and investigate whether this rationale is impacted by public opinion and expert views. The analysis is based on a survey experiment conducted in Australia and Austria. It finds that voters broadly adhere to the democratic principle of expecting pledge fulfilment but, at the same time, some take a rational approach to government promises. The opinions of the public and experts mitigate but do not change this effect. Another key finding is the significant difference in the preference for promise keeping versus promise breaking between government and opposition voters in the Austrian case, the country with the more heterogeneous and polarized political system. This paper contributes to the literature on voters’ attitudes on democracy and pledge fulfilment by showing that voters are normatively driven but a significant number of voters deviate and instead follow the rational voter logic.

The increased salience of environmental concerns, first and foremost global warming, is one of the key developments of contemporary Western European politics. Still, the effects of global warming issues on electoral outcomes, party competition and polarization remain poorly understood. Our article shows how the construction of wind turbines fuels conflict between its key proponents and opponents, Green and populist radical right parties. Contention over the issue contributes to the electoral success of both sides and therefore reinforces the new central divide between them. Drawing on a novel dataset, we investigate the impact of the construction of wind turbines on Alternative für Deutschland and Green party electoral success in Germany. We employ a two‐way fixed effects model, where the construction of wind turbines functions as the independent variable. We show that the construction of wind turbines boosts the electoral support of both their biggest supporters and their biggest opponents. Our results have important implications for understanding contemporary political conflict in Western Europe such as the electoral rise of the Greens and the populist radical right, the importance of issue salience and the polarization of party systems.

This article analyses the role of political parties in policy accumulation. We study this relationship in the area of social policy. Our analysis builds on a large data set covering the size of policy portfolios (policy targets and instruments) in three subfields of social policy for 22 OECD countries over 30 years. We find that the probability of social policy accumulation is not affected by the government's ideological position. Left governments do not produce more extensive social policy portfolios than right ones. Yet, this striking result does not contradict governments’ political ideologies, as left and right parties accumulate for different reasons. While left parties address new social policy targets to broaden the scope of the welfare state, right parties adopt new policy instruments to condition social benefits. These findings hold regardless of how we measure governments’ ideological position and despite strong endogenous policy growth dynamics, that is, countries with greater policy portfolios also display higher levels of policy accumulation. Our findings indicate that party political considerations can explain the reasons for but not the level of policy accumulation. Changes in government are thus unlikely to stall or slow down the constant accumulation of public policies.

Immigration is a hot topic in Europe, but research on the media effects on public attention to immigration remains limited. We examine how media coverage affects the degree of importance attached to immigration in seven Western European Union member states. Data come from an extensive analysis of claims in printed newspapers, and the Eurobarometer (2002–2009). The continuous sample of news coverage is aggregated into a biannual panel, and we relate these data to citizens’ perceptions of the most important issues in their country 6 months later (lagged). The public consider immigration more important than other policy‐related issues when there is an increase in the volume of news and more political claims on the topic in the media. The media environment appears to be an exogenous actor that can have agenda‐setting effects on public concern about immigration. Our results highlight limitations of both the ‘policy‐gap’ thesis and thermostatic models of policy making.

This paper explores a major road to substantive representation in democracies, by clarifying whether demands of rich and poor citizens are taken up in the electoral platforms of political parties. Doing so constitutes a substantial broadening and deepening of our understanding of substantive representation – broadening the countries, issue‐areas and years that form the empirical basis for judging whether democracies manifest unequal representation; and deepening the process of representation by clarifying a key pathway connecting societal demands to policy outcomes. The paper hypothesises that party systems in general will respond more strongly to wealthy than to poor segments of a polity. It also hypothesises that left parties will more faithfully represent poorer and less significantly represent richer citizens than do right parties. We find substantial support for these expectations in a new dataset that combines multi‐country, multi‐issue‐area, multi‐wave survey data with data on party platforms for 39 democracies.

With the installation of next-generation phased array feed (PAF) receivers on radio telescopes, there is an urgent need to develop effective and computationally efficient radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation methods for large-scale surveys. Here, we present a new RFI mitigation package, called mRAID (multi-beam RAdio frequency Interference Detector), which uses the eigenvalue decomposition algorithm to identify RFI in cross-correlation matrix (CCM) of data recorded by multiple beams. When applied to high time-resolution pulsar search data from the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), mRAID demonstrates excellent performance in identifying RFI over short timescales, thereby enhancing the efficiency of pulsar and fast radio burst (FRB) searches. Since the computation of the CCM and the eigenvalue decomposition for each time sub-integration and frequency channel are independent, the process is fully parallelisable. As a result, mRAID offers a significant computational advantage over commonly used RFI detection methods.

To what extent do ministries dominate a particular policy domain? The policy dictator model and many principle‐agent models of governmental control that followed suit assume that governments create ministries with clear and exclusive policy responsibilities. We test this assertion using data from parliamentary bills from Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. For each bill, we observe its substantial policy content and the responsible ministry. The data show that bills on similar issues regularly are drafted by different ministries in parliamentary democracies. About 40 per cent of policy issues cannot be ascribed to one dominant ministry. The regularities elucidate that ministerial division of labour within governments is considerably more complex than commonly assumed. The variegated level of ministerial dominance across policy domains calls for a new research agenda on how governments assign responsibility for legislative action in parliamentary democracies.

Political parties in office generally incur a cost of ruling among the electorate. This article considers the broader implications of this phenomenon for democratic governance. We argue that the electoral cost a party incurs in office entails that its individual legislators become more inclined to vote against the party line as a way to distance themselves from the deteriorating party brand. We test and support several observable implications of this argument using time series data including all members of parliament in the British parliament between 1992 and 2015 coupled with monthly opinion poll data. The well‐established electoral cost of ruling thus translates into a legislative cost of ruling by reducing incumbent party legislators’ loyalty to the party line. We discuss how the legislative cost of ruling complicates effective governance but may also strengthen democratic accountability by reducing legislative capacity of governing parties that have lost their electoral mandate.

Eating duration and shift work can both influence metabolic regulation, but their joint associations with diabetes are unknown. We aimed to examine the independent and joint associations of eating duration and shift work with diabetes in a cross-sectional study using a nationally representative sample of US workers. We included 14852 eligible participants from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2005–2010 and 2017–2020. Eating duration was calculated based on first and last eating occasions from 24-h dietary recalls. Long eating duration (LED: ≥ 13 h) v. short eating duration (SED: < 13 h) was defined based on the median. Workers were classified as engaging in shift work (SW, n 5140) v. non-shift work (NSW, n 8945) based on self-report. Logistic regressions were used to examine the associations of LED and SW with diabetes, independently and jointly with stratification by age. LED was associated with higher odds of diabetes among workers aged < 45 years (OR, 1·51; 95 % CI, 1·05–2·19) but not among workers aged ≥ 45 years (OR, 0·98; 95 % CI, 0·79–1·20). SW was associated with higher odds of diabetes among both younger (OR, 1·28; 95 % CI, 0·88–1·85) and older workers (OR, 1·28; 95 % CI, 1·04–1·58). There was suggestive evidence that workers with both LED and SW had higher odds of diabetes compared with those with SED and NSW, but the association was stronger among younger (OR, 1·40; 95 % CI, 0·85–2·28) than older workers (OR, 1·28; 95 % CI, 0·99–1·66). LED and SW were independently associated with increased odds of diabetes with suggestive evidence on their joint associations, but associations varied by workers’ age.

Switches produce a lack of credibility and damage a party's image, signalling weakness and an inability to select loyal MPs and preserve unity. Accordingly, we consider party out‐switching as a valence loss for the party. By combining information on party manifestos with a novel database on 2053 episodes of party switching, we investigate which electoral strategies parties adopt to reduce the negative consequences of such valence loss. Analyzing 1,131 manifestos related to 135 parties in 14 Western European democracies, from 1945 to 2015, we show that parties try to restore their positive image by investing on valence, in terms of competence, clarity and core issues. An instrumental variable approach corroborates our results. The findings have implications for spatial modelling, valence politics, issue ownership and issue competition.

Populist parties have been increasingly successful in European politics over the last decade. Although research suggests that nostalgic deprivation – a perceived loss of economic, political or social status — is linked to support for populist parties, the generalizability of this argument across voters and national contexts remains unclear. In this research note, we leverage original representative surveys across 19 European countries to demonstrate that perceptions of declining status are a consistent predictor of populist support. Decomposing nostalgic deprivation into different dimensions, we find that while social, economic and power deprivation have different antecedents, each predicts populist attitudes and voting behaviour. Moreover, we find that nostalgic deprivation predicts support for populist platforms among both left‐wing and right‐wing respondents, as well as across Eastern and Western Europe.  While the antecedents differ across contexts, these findings confirm that perceptions of downward mobility are associated with the rise of populism in Europe.