As political polarization increases across many of the world's established democracies, many citizens are unwilling to appreciate and consider the viewpoints of those who disagree with them. Previous research shows that this lack of reflection can undermine democratic accountability. The purpose of this paper is to study whether empathy for the other can motivate people to reason reflectively about politics. Extant studies have largely studied trait‐level differences in the ability and inclination of individuals to engage in reflection. Most of these studies focus on observational moderators, which makes it difficult to make strong claims about the effects of being in a reflective state on political decision making. We extend this research by using a survey experiment with a large and heterogeneous sample of UK citizens (N = 2014) to investigate whether a simple empathy intervention can induce people to consider opposing viewpoints and incorporate those views in their opinion about a pressing political issue. We find that actively imagining the feelings and thoughts of someone one disagrees with prompts more reflection in the way that people reason about political issues as well as elicits empathic feelings of concern towards those with opposing viewpoints. We further examine whether empathy facilitates openness to attitude change in the counter‐attitudinal direction and find that exposure to an opposing perspective (without its empathy component) per se is enough to prompt attitude change. Our study paints a more nuanced picture of the relationship between empathy, reflection and policy attitudes.

Political parties face inherent risks when making election promises, as voters tend to penalize them for unfulfilled commitments. Nonetheless, parties make hundreds of promises. Why do parties engage in such precarious behaviour? I argue that parties employ a policy‐committing strategy when they need to increase the credibility of their policy programme and that they do so more today than previously because the political landscape has changed considerably in many Western democracies (time trend). Moreover, I expect parties to use the policy‐committing strategy more when they operate in a political arena with more competitors (system‐level factor), when they are a mainstream party (party‐level factor) and when they have increased the saliency of an issue (issue‐level factor). I test these four expectations with a unique, new dataset containing 330,850 quasi‐sentences coded from party manifestoes in 11 countries covering several decades of elections. Empirically, I find support for a time trend and show strong effects for the party‐level and issue‐level factors. However, a more competitive environment at the system level makes parties less, not more, likely to use the policy‐committing strategy. These results have important implications for party strategies, issue competition and policymaking in today's democracies.

The consequences of economic globalization on electoral outcomes have recently become a prominent topic of research. We complement the emerging literature on this topic by studying whether changes in a subnational region's trade competitiveness affect the incumbent's vote share in that region. Using a novel dataset that relates subnational trade competitiveness to election results in 29 countries over a 20‐year period, we show that this is indeed the case. We also show that this effect is most pronounced for elections where the clarity of responsibility is high. Finally, we find mixed evidence for a moderating effect of incumbents' economic ideology as a moderator. These findings also contribute to the broader economic voting literature.

This article reconstructs the coming about of the 750 billion EU Covid Recovery Fund. We provide an embedded process‐tracing analysis of the dynamics from mid‐March 2020, when the idea of ‘Corona‐bonds’ was parachuted onto the Heads’ Agenda, up until the ‘historic’ deal on the Multiannual Financial Framework and Recovery Fund of 21 July. Where most media accounts and scholarly assessments focus on the high‐level deal making between political leaders, we trace the proceedings inside the EU's institutional machinery, which produced the solutions and laid out the groundwork for a deal. The reconstruction assesses the role and influence of the EU institutions – the European Commission in particular – in producing this major step. We show that the process was characterized by a handicapped European Council, which hampered the ability of member states to oversee and control developments. The conclusions discuss the implications of our findings for our understanding of (institutional) leadership and policy making during crisis.

Since about 1960, the study of petroglyphs and pictographs has escaped the confines of anthropology, art history, and philology and established itself as a discrete field of transdisciplinary scholarship, supported by its own organizations, periodicals, and lexicon. “Rock art research” emerged as the field’s moniker, and “rock art” became the most popular term for describing anthropogenic marks in and on geological surfaces. However, this label has sparked controversy over whether “art” is an accurate, ethical, and inclusive gloss for non-Western and premodern imagery. Although some pragmatic scholars, preservationists, and descendant community representatives accept this nomenclature, others find it imprecise, distracting, and, at times, offensive. We advance this debate with results from two surveys. First, a review of article titles published since 1865 shows that “rock art” is just one of many terms used in the field, and it is one of the youngest. Second, a survey of federally recognized Tribes found strong though not universal dissatisfaction with “rock art” to characterize ancestral petroglyphs and pictographs. As a bridge between field practitioners and descendant communities, we recommend that researchers and organizations work with Tribes to develop and use terms that are respectful, useful, and of mutual benefit.

When reporting on election results, the media declare parties as election ‘winners’ or ‘losers’, which has important consequences for voter perceptions and government formation. This article investigates news coverage of parties’ electoral performance in proportional representation systems, in which election results are often less clear‐cut compared to majoritarian systems. It tests the extent to which news coverage of parties’ electoral performance is based on objective measures or on party ideology. Its focus on the aftermath of the 2019 European Parliament election allows holding the electoral context constant across the 16 countries under study. Results from a Heckman selection model show that alongside a party's status as plurality winner and changes in electoral support, parties with radical socio‐cultural policy positions are both more likely to be covered and declared election winners in the news. These results have important implications for citizens’ attitudes and perceived party legitimacy in democratic societies.

For decades, political scientists have hotly debated longitudinal trends in political trust rates. An important undercurrent in the debate is that any decline in political trust might signal a legitimacy crisis. Yet, descriptive figures are unable to distinguish between two interpretations of these downward trends: (i) declines that can reasonably be expected as a reflection of declining political trustworthiness (i.e., procedural or output performance) and thereby reflect critical citizens who monitor their democratic institutions; and (ii) downward trends that are not warranted by democratic performance and thereby suggest a more fundamental disconnect between citizens and their democratic institutions.

This research note argues that residuals to multilevel models of political trust allow us to distinguish between these two types, and thereby provide a better understanding of trends in political trust. These residuals do not only reveal short‐term aberrations to the explanatory model (often reflecting short‐lived, country‐specific events), but also the extent to which a country's trust rate systematically underperforms in the middle‐ to long‐term. To the extent that declining trust rates are lower than explanatory models predict, the residuals express excessive distrust. To the extent that declining trust rates are in line with the explanatory models, the residuals reflect critical, monitoring citizenship.

We outline the approach of residual analyses as a tool to better understand trends in political trust. We illustrate the use of these residual analyses on a cross‐national, longitudinal data set (the Eurobarometer), covering 15 Western and Southern European countries between 1999 and 2019. While political trust rates fluctuate in all these countries, we only find evidence for a structural decline in two of these countries. In France and Spain political trust failed to recover in line with improving economic and institutional performance after the Great Recession. We then test the versatility of the tool to different conditions, including retests on an alternative set of countries (11 Central and Eastern European countries between 2004 and 2019) and an alternative dataset with different measures and time points (the European Social Survey).

Finally, we elaborate on the two main conditions under which residual analyses offer a useful tool to the trend debate in political trust research: (1) a firm understanding of the object‐driven determinants of political trust, and (2) a detailed coverage of country‐wave combinations to separate structural trends from short‐term fluctuations.

Does gender affect candidate selection and list placement under proportional representation (PR)? Existing research argues that PR systems have a positive effect on women's representation due to a more inclusive candidate selection process. However, analysing the actual process of candidate selection under PR before observing the final party list is challenging, and little is known about the preferences and strategies of party elites when selecting and ranking candidates. To address this lacuna, we conduct a novel two‐stage conjoint experiment with party elites in Austria, which allows us to differentiate between two distinct mechanisms in candidate nomination under PR: selection and ranking. Our findings indicate that women generally have an advantage with respect to selection but find themselves subject to same‐sex preferences when it comes to ranking on the list, for which they otherwise benefit from being low in supply. These findings have important implications for understanding patterns of female under‐representation in PR systems.

The COVID‐19 pandemic led to widespread fear among the population. Early studies suggested that this resulted in exclusionary attitudes and increased support for discriminatory policy measures. We still lack an understanding of the longer‐term, potentially erosive consequences that COVID‐19‐specific anxieties may carry for citizens' commitment to liberal democratic norms. In this research note, we present evidence from an original experiment in which we manipulate individuals' cognitive accessibility of their fears related to COVID‐19. We implemented this experiment in Hungary and Romania – two cases where illiberal attitudes are most likely to amplify under conditions of fear – a year and a half after the outbreak of the pandemic. The results show that our intervention is successful in elevating respondents' levels of worry, anxiety and fear when thinking about infectious diseases like COVID‐19. However, these emotions do not carry secondary effects on individuals' levels of right‐wing authoritarianism, nationalism or outgroup hostility, nor do they affect preferences for specific discriminatory policy measures aimed to fight a potential resurgence of COVID‐19. We discuss these findings in light of the literature on the demand‐side determinants of democratic backsliding and the consequences of emotions on political behaviour.

Extensive media coverage of immigration, that is, media salience, has been thought to heighten anti-immigrant attitudes among native-born citizens by creating an information environment that portrays immigration as society's greatest problem. However, past empirical findings on the relationship between media salience and anti-immigrant attitudes have been mixed. Some studies have observed that media salience increases hostility towards immigrants, while others have found it has no significant influence. This study investigates the underlying reasons for these inconsistent findings and demonstrates the need to revisit the meaning of issue importance. It employs the concept of public issue salience, the perception that immigration is the most important problem or concern about immigration, to find evidence. It argues that when the immigrant issue is a pivotal point of political competition, the immigration issue signals conflicts, connoting negativity so public issue salience and anti-immigrant attitudes are closely related. On the other hand, in an environment where political elites reach a consensus, the immigration issue remains neutral so that they can be disentangled. The scope of media salience changes accordingly as well. This study chooses the United Kingdom and Germany for comparative research due to their similarities in immigration histories and the success of far-right parties as well as differences in their major political parties' reactions to the issue. I match individual-level longitudinal survey data to media article data and find clear country differences. In the United Kingdom, where political parties are polarized over the issue, public issue salience and anti-immigrant attitudes are closely related so that media salience heightens them. In Germany, where political elites across different ideologies hold welcoming stances, their relationship is moderate. Media salience merely increases the perceived importance and does not increase anti-immigrant attitudes. Contributions and implications are discussed with respect to political elites' role.

Voters show ambivalent attitudes towards political parties: They agree that parties are necessary, but they neither like nor trust them. Existing theories fall short of explaining this paradox because they pay little attention to public opinion research. In this paper, we develop a different argument using qualitative methods. We first integrate the literature on political parties and public opinion to sketch the contours of our theory before refining it using rich empirical insights from open-ended survey answers and focus group data. Our resulting model holds that voters evaluate political parties based on the functional and virtuous linkages. They consider parties necessary because they see them as fulfilling democratic functions, but they dislike them because they are seen as behaving in non-virtuous ways when fulfilling their functions. Besides proposing a new analytical model, we also contribute to the literature by methodologically illustrating how to develop data-based theories.

How much do citizens support artificial intelligence (AI) in government and politics at different levels of decision‐making authority and to what extent is this AI support associated with citizens’ conceptions of democracy? Using original survey data from Germany, the analysis shows that people are overall sceptical toward using AI in the political realm. The findings suggest that how much citizens endorse democracy as liberal democracy as opposed to several of its disfigurations matters for AI support, but only in high‐level politics. While a stronger commitment to liberal democracy is linked to lower support for AI, the findings contradict the idea that a technocratic notion of democracy lies behind greater acceptance of political AI uses. Acceptance is higher only among those holding reductionist conceptions of democracy which embody the idea that whatever works to accommodate people's views and preferences is fine. Populists, in turn, appear to be against AI in political decision making.

The personalization of politics includes electoral reforms that give voters more opportunity to select individual representatives as well as behavioural personalization among voters and politicians. Institutional research suggests that the latter is a function of the former, but it remains unclear whether the association between the two types of personalization is actually causal. In order to get empirical leverage on this question, we analyze local elections in Denmark, which feature within‐district and within‐party variation in the openness of party lists. Using detailed information on the behaviour of politicians and voters, we find that, once we take differences between districts and parties into account, the personalization of electoral rules has a negligible effect on behavioural personalization.

Scholars increasingly raise concerns about the alleged detrimental impact of affective polarization on citizens’ democratic attitudes. Yet, prior studies on the relationship between affective polarization and democratic support have yielded mixed results: Whereas some scholars report evidence that affective polarization erodes citizens’ support for democracy, others report null findings. In this research note, we posit that one relevant explanation for these mixed results is that the relationship between affective polarization and democratic support is not linear, but rather negatively curvilinear (i.e., an inverted U‐shape). Though extreme levels of affective polarization may harm citizens’ democratic commitments, a moderate amount of affective polarization can strengthen democratic support by heightening the political stakes and stimulating democratic involvement. Employing generalized additive modelling on data from the CNEP collected in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we show strong and robust support for this negatively curvilinear pattern. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the dynamics between affective polarization and democratic support, as well as for the recommended estimation strategies of future studies that aim to explore this relationship.