When do politicians debate each other in parliament, and when do they prefer to avoid discourse? While existing research has shown MPs to unilaterally leverage the dialogical nature of legislative debates to their advantage, the circumstances facilitating actual discursive interaction have so far received less attention. We introduce a new framework to study the emergence of discourse in political debates. Applying this framework, we expect ideological differences and government–opposition dynamics to shape politicians' choices about seeking or avoiding discourse. To test these hypotheses, we draw on an original dataset of all 14,595 attempted and successful interventions (Zwischenfragen) – extraordinary, voluntary discursive exchanges between speakers and MPs in the audience – in the German Bundestag (1990–2020), extracted using an annotation pipeline developed specifically for this study. We find that MPs separated by diverging preferences seek discourse with one another more often than their ideologically aligned counterparts. At the same time, these exact attempts do less frequently result in discursive interactions. When considering government–opposition dynamics in this process, we observe very similar patterns: Attempts to initiate discourse are particularly common among opposition MPs facing government speakers, and we find tentative evidence suggesting that government actors are most likely to avoid these invitations to discursive interaction. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of elite behaviour in public environments.

A serious challenge facing Western democracies is the falling propensity of successive cohorts of citizens to vote. Over the last 50 years, newly eligible voters – particularly from poorer backgrounds – have become less likely to vote in their first elections, and more likely to develop habits of non‐voting. This trend has prompted greater interest in policies with the potential to increase first‐time voter turnout, such as lowering the voting age or compulsory political education. Despite a growing academic interest in volunteering as a means of youth political expression or route to civic revival, however, the promotion of youth volunteering has not been seriously considered as a potential tool to help address generational turnout decline.

An extensive literature argues that volunteering can increase first‐time voter turnout, but it is hindered by the limited use of panel data and failure to account for confounding and selection effects. It has not, moreover, considered the potential for the effects of childhood volunteering to be conditional on prior political socialisation, particularly the influence of parents, which is necessary to assess its potential to reduce turnout gaps reflecting socio‐economic status. This study uses the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study and structural equation modelling to overcome these limitations and examine the impact of childhood volunteering on the turnout of newly eligible voters. It shows that for most young volunteers there is no significant benefit, but for the children of politically disengaged parents, volunteering does have a significant, positive effect.

The Internet is playing an increasingly important role in shaping citizens’ political experience. We turn to it to consume political news and, in some countries, to even cast our ballots at parliamentary elections. Leading the way in embracing Internet voting (i‐voting) is Estonia where nearly half of the ballots cast during the 2019 parliamentary election were submitted online. Using original data from the 2019 Estonian Candidate Study, this paper explores the relationship between how candidates campaign and their electoral performance. It finds greater use of both offline and online campaign tools to contribute to higher vote shares as candidates win more traditional and i‐votes. These positive effects are similar in size, in terms of candidates’ overall electoral performance as well as their ability to attract different types of votes. The results show not only that individual‐level campaigns continue to matter, but that online campaigns have become as important as offline campaigns for candidates, and voters’ political activity often transcends the medium through which they receive political communication.

Past research has often attributed electoral backlash to structural economic change to a lack of compensation and interest group representation for affected groups. Is that backlash then mitigated in contexts where both of these conditions are fulfilled? I argue that perceived economic deprivation fuelling political disengagement as well as disappointment with the issue‐owning party are important factors contributing to such a backlash. Using the case of Germany, I empirically analyse the electoral repercussions of a coal phase‐out in the presence of compensation for affected groups as well as active involvement of labour and business interests in political decision‐making. By employing a series of staggered difference‐in‐differences models, I investigate whether the closures of coal plants and mines between 2007 and 2022 affected voting behaviour at the municipal level. I find that these closures resulted in an asymmetric backlash in the form of lower vote shares for the issue owner, the Social Democratic Party and higher abstention rates in affected municipalities. With the significant politicisation around fossil fuel‐based energy generation, these findings have important implications for the remaining coal phase‐outs worldwide.

Previous scholarship suggests that rising inequality in democracies suppresses trust in institutions. However, the mechanism behind this has not clearly been identified. This paper investigates the proposition that income inequality leads to increased democratic distrust by depressing perceptions of external efficacy. Based on time‐series cross‐sectional survey data from the European Social Survey, we find that changes in income inequality have a negative effect on changes in political trust and external efficacy. Causal mediation analysis confirms that inequality affects trust through lower efficacy. Further analyses show that this efficacy‐based mechanism does not depend on political orientation. As a direct effect remains among left‐wing respondents, our empirical results indicate that inequality affects trust via both a mechanism of substantive output evaluation and a process‐based evaluation that measures of external efficacy can capture. These findings highlight the empirical and theoretical relevance of this so far neglected mechanism and provide a potential solution for the puzzle that inequality depresses trust also among those for whom inequality is not politically salient.

Individual legislators can be important agents of political representation. However, this is contingent upon their responsiveness to constituency requests. To study this topic, an increasing number of studies use field experiments in which the researcher sends a standardized email to legislators on behalf of a constituent. In this paper, we report the results of an original field experiment of this genre with the members of the German Bundestag. Supplementing previous research, we explore whether constituency requests in which voters mention a personal vote intention (rather than a partisan vote intention) increase legislators’ responsiveness, and how this treatment relates to electoral system's incentives. We find that legislators treated with a personal vote intention were more likely to respond (67 per cent) and respond faster than those treated with a partisan vote intention (59 per cent). However, we also show that the treatment effect is moderated by electoral system incentives: it is larger for nominally‐elected legislators than for those elected via a party list. Our results suggest that electoral system's incentives matter for legislators’ responsiveness only when constituents explicitly signals an intention to cast a personal vote.

Does pledge fulfilment bear any electoral consequences for government parties? While previous research on retrospective voting has largely focused on electoral accountability with respect to the economy, the theoretical framework presented in this study links government parties’ performance to their previous electoral pledges. It is argued that government parties are more likely to be rewarded by voters when they have fulfilled more pledges during the legislative term. Good pledge performance of a party is associated with the ability to maximise policy benefits (accomplishment) and to be a responsible actor that will stick to its promises in the future as well (competence). Analysing data from 69 elections in 14 countries shows that a government party's electoral outcome is affected by its previous pledge performance. A government party that fulfils a higher share of election pledges is more likely to prevent electoral losses. This finding indicates that voters react at the polls to party pledge fulfilment, which highlights the crucial role of promissory representation in democratic regimes. Surprisingly and in contrast with economic voting, there is no evidence that retrospective pledge voting is moderated by clarity of responsibility.

How do democratic states induce citizens to comply with government directives during times of acute crisis? Focusing on the onset of the Covid‐19 pandemic in France, I argue that the tools states use to activate adherence to public health advice have predictable and variable effects on citizens’ willingness to change their routine private behaviours, both because of variation in their levels of restrictiveness but also because of differences in people's political motivations to comply with them. Using data collected in March 2020, I show that people's reports of changes in their behavioural routines are affected by the signals governments send, how they send them and the level of enforcement. I find that a nationally televised speech by President Macron calling for cooperative behaviour and announcing new restrictions elevated people's willingness to comply. Moreover, while co‐partisanship with the incumbent government increased compliance reports before the President's primetime television address, presidential approval boosted reports of compliance after.

How do welfare systems affect natives' attitudes to immigration? The impact of immigration on public support for welfare and redistribution has received considerable scholarly attention, but we know much less about how welfare policies shape citizens' views about immigration. We focus on two mechanisms: an instrumental channel and a values‐based approach. Our empirical strategy is two‐pronged. Hierarchical models leveraging variation in immigration attitudes and welfare generosity both between countries and over time (2002–2019) suggest that more comprehensive welfare regimes are associated with more positive views of immigrants. Furthermore, a regression discontinuity design drawing on a natural experiment in Denmark reveals that hostility towards immigrants increased following the announcement of a welfare retrenchment reform. Together, these analyses shed light on how the welfare state influences immigration attitudes.

This study examines how meso-level institutions within Ostrom’s polycentric governance systems guide farmers’ deliberative preferences for collective adaptation to saltwater inundation in the Philippines and Viet Nam. Specifically, the paper investigates three mechanisms of meso-institutional influence: legitimacy creation, belief formation, and social enforcement that shape farmers’ collective adaptation. Using multinomial logistic regression with cluster-robust standard errors on survey data from rice farmers, results show that institutional embeddedness depends on both physical exposure and socioeconomic capacity; information access enhances belief accuracy and collective preferences in contexts where institutional trust is high; and legitimacy-based feasibility significantly strengthens support for collective measures. Findings also show country differences in managing high-externality adaptation measures, with only Viet Nam exhibiting sensitivity to institutional quality at higher externality levels. Comparative results reveal that autonomous, participatory meso-institutions in the Philippines generate stronger deliberative preferences and more cohesive collective adaptation than state-centred structures in Viet Nam.

This article undertakes a comprehensive investigation into several common critiques of career politicians. Career politicians are said to be self‐serving: active and assertive when it suits their career interests, and much more interested in attaining higher offices than in serving as constituency‐oriented MPs. Yet, empirical investigations of their alleged behaviours are few, and the results are patchy and mixed. Focusing on the United Kingdom case and using a multi‐dimensional conceptualization that accords with academic and popular understandings of career politicians, the article draws on uniquely rich attitudinal and longitudinal behavioural data covering the first large generational wave of career politicians to be elected to parliament in the early 1970s. It reports findings consistent with contemporary critiques, suggesting that such dispositions are inherent in the role of career politician. The strongest career politicians among this first wave concentrated strategically on career‐serving activities, voted strategically to safeguard their careers, attained and retained successfully ministerial offices and prioritized their personal goals over their party obligations. The article further demonstrates that different measures used by researchers can produce contradictory results and that future comparative research should seek to range beyond unidimensional indicators.

Tolerance has long been identified as a crucial feature of liberal democracies. Although the limits of tolerance are debated, the extent to which citizens are open and willing to accommodate others who are different from them is often regarded as a sign of a healthy and well‐functioning liberal democracy. The goal of this paper is to empirically investigate the state of political tolerance in Europe today. The main questions we ask are: What explains the different levels of tolerance across individuals in various countries? Which groups in society are the most likely targets of intolerance? We understand political tolerance as the willingness to allow the free articulation of interests and ideas in the political system of groups one opposes. Previous research emphasizes education, civic activism and threat perceptions as important determinants of tolerance. We redirect the debate to a set of novel correlates of tolerance. We argue that conspiratorial thinking and cosmopolitanism are critical factors that explain levels of tolerance among Europeans. The analysis employs original survey data collected as part of a mass survey conducted in 2017 in 10 European Union member states: Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom. Our descriptive analysis shows that far‐right groups (i.e., fascists and neo‐Nazis) and Muslims are the most disliked groups in Europe. When it comes to the level of tolerance towards these groups, we find that more than half of the respondents in each country are willing to deny their most disliked group parliamentary representation. Moreover, we find that even after controlling for traditional determinants of tolerance, conspiratorial thinking and cosmopolitanism emerge as the most important predictors of political tolerance. Our analysis suggests that the recent rapid spread of various conspiracy theories related to the COVID‐19 pandemic is likely to have far‐reaching implications for tolerance as well.

We examine the existence and strength of organizational ties between parties and interest groups by innovating on classic resource exchange theory. First, we propose that the nature of interest groups’ policy orientation and their general organizational capacity primarily explain the presence of ties, that is, ties are less likely to materialize when groups lack ideological policy goals and have limited organizational capacity. Second, the size and types of resources on offer from both sides are what principally account for the strength of existing ties. We hypothesize that resources from both parties and interest groups are positively associated with institutionalized relationships, but also that resources are hierarchically ordered, that is, resources that are exclusive for the transaction are particularly important for ties at higher levels of institutionalization. Using data from a novel organizational survey of parties and interest groups in seven Western democracies, we find support for the hypotheses using an integrated design of analysis.

The sourcing of exotic raw materials provides a window into the social networks of ancient peoples. Here we source copper from four archaeological contexts at the Mound City Group, a UNESCO World Heritage site and major Hopewell ceremonial site in south-central Ohio, USA. Results of laser ablation–inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry indicate the use of copper at Mound City from both the Great Lakes Copper District and the southern Appalachians. Forty-two percent of the Mound City sample was classified as southern Appalachian copper, a higher percentage than for any other large Ohio Hopewell site tested. The use of Appalachian copper has not been documented in earlier, pre-Hopewell contexts in the central Ohio Valley. This new pattern correlates with both an increased demand for copper and the development of broader-based social networks connecting the central Ohio River Valley with the Southeast. This context is different from and complementary to that of the “copper trail” to the north established hundreds of years earlier.

One of the main supply‐side explanations for women's underrepresentation in politics is the gender gap in nascent political ambition. While this has been examined in terms of electoral ambition, the aspiration to pursue non‐electoral careers within parties has been overlooked. In our study, we therefore investigate whether both types of ambition – electoral and non‐electoral – vary among young women and men participating in a key entry point for political careers in Western democracies: party youth wings. To do so, we surveyed almost 2,000 members of six centre‐left and centre‐right youth wings in Australia, Italy and Spain. We find that while, as expected, women in youth wings display lower levels of electoral ambition, they are almost as likely as men to express non‐electoral ambition. Furthermore, and contrary to our expectations, we show that women in centre‐right youth wings are no less interested in pursuing electoral and non‐electoral political careers than women in centre‐left ones. Our study thus provides new insights into the gendered nature of political ambition, highlighting that women's lower interest in electoral office does not necessarily reflect reduced interest in a political career.

The use of emotive rhetoric in legislative debates has attracted increasing scholarly attention in political science research. Building on recent scholarship, I examine the conditions under which emotive rhetoric dominates legislative speeches in the UK House of Commons between 2001 and 2015. By coding nearly half a million legislative speeches according to Ekman's six basic emotions – anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise – I argue that members of parliament (MPs) strategically use emotions in their speeches to maximize their influence and visibility. The findings reveal modest but discernible effects related to electoral safety, seniority and party status. Specifically, the results show that speeches by electorally vulnerable, junior and opposition MPs contain higher levels of emotive language compared to those by other MPs. Notably, despite considerable similarity in the correlates of individual emotion categories, there are also significant differences. For example, opposition MPs and electorally vulnerable MPs rely more heavily on negative emotions such as anger, disgust, fear and sadness than government MPs and electorally safer MPs. While junior MPs use fear, sadness and surprise at higher rates compared to their senior counterparts, they are statistically indistinguishable from senior MPs in their use of anger, disgust and joy. Overall, these results underscore the need for greater scholarly attention to the communication styles of representatives in legislatures and emphasize the importance of examining the nuanced strategies behind the use of different types of emotions.