This paper challenges some widespread theoretical assumptions and practices in the study of populism and proposes a new multidimensional approach to generate and analyse data on this latent construct. Rather than focusing on categorising subjects as populists or not, it recommends reaching a better understanding of what populism is, the salience and relative weight of its attributes and how they interact creating an inner populist logic.

Despite the increasing media and academic attention, historical discrepancies in how to conceptualise and operationalise populism have hindered cumulative progress in the literature. Initially most efforts were devoted to the study of specific movements, without a clear comparative angle, and the concept of populism was often conflated with that of nationalism. When the literature started to pay more attention to the analysis of the attributes associated with populism serious disagreements emerged concerning its true essence. Populism has been conceptualised as an ideology, a cynical strategy, a performative style and a discursive logic of articulation. The disputes between these competing interpretations have arguably slowed down the generation of comparative data.

Although this article is meant to be a critique of the current state of the field and a call to make it pivot into a slightly different direction, it does not adopt an iconoclast stance and largely tries to reconcile the different existing research traditions – ideational, discursive, performative and strategic. It shows that their efforts are to a great extent complementary but mostly operating on different rungs of the ladder of abstraction. This paper argues that shifting from minimal definitions into a multidimensional approach may stimulate the generation of comparative data on a wider range of attributes and facilitate the identification of degrees and varieties within populism.

This paper develops a new analytical framework which deconstructs populism into five dimensions: (1) depiction of the polity, (2) morality, (3) construction of society, (4) sovereignty and (5) leadership. These dimensions, that synthesise the most influential conceptualisations of populism, are empirically and theoretically interconnected and encompass ideational, discursive and performative attributes suggested in the literature. These dimensions are in turn composed of lower order attributes forming a multilayered network structure. This multidimensional framework provides a heuristic template that can be adapted and operationalised in diverse ways depending on the hypotheses, type of data and subjects of the analysis. Some examples of how to turn these dimensions into variables to capture supply‐ and demand‐side populism are introduced. Future empirical research could help map and better understand the network of interactions and intersections among these dimensions and attributes. This could be the key to settle some of the current conceptual debates about populism and its varieties.

This study examines the ideological alignment of beliefs within opposing partisan camps in Europe. Integrating multiple types of research, I hypothesize that partisans on the ideological left exhibit greater alignment in their beliefs compared to those on the right – an asymmetry that extends across various issues. I argue that on the scale of ideological contention, it matters if partisans on one ideological pole are more aligned in beliefs than those on the other. Only the less ideological of opposing camps determines the extent of mutual disagreement. Utilizing conventional methods and innovative belief network modelling, I analyse survey data from the fourth and eighth waves of the European Social Survey (2008, 2016). To test the hypothesis, I match partisans with the data on their party's ideology, covering partisans from 131 parties in 15 European countries to test this hypothesis. My findings reveal that, both at the European level and within national contexts, there is a broad and substantive asymmetry between the right and the left across ideological dimensions and issues. However, the study also uncovers the limits of this asymmetry, highlighting a significant shift in ideological alignment on sociocultural issues on the right, indicating the emergence of a deeper, broader ideological conflict in that dimension. Furthermore, my analysis demonstrates the marginal influence of strategies like position blurring and programmatic nicheness. These insights shed light on the nature of partisan contention in Europe and how it disproportionately depends on ideological alignment on the right.

This study examines sentence comprehension in two in-situ heritage Slovene communities in Italy’s border-shift context, comparing the Gorizia/Trieste (N = 66) and Natisone Valley (N = 43) adult populations with monolingual Slovene speakers. While both heritage groups operate in Italian-dominant bilingual environments near the Slovenian border, they differ in Slovene exposure due to varying institutional support. Using a sentence–picture verification task, this study examines comprehension of non-canonical word order, relative clauses and cataphoric dependencies. The Gorizia/Trieste group performed comparably to monolinguals, demonstrating strong sensitivity to case morphology and syntactic processing. Conversely, the Natisone group showed reduced accuracy and longer response times across all domains, reflecting case system vulnerability and processing limitations linked to reduced exposure. These findings highlight the important role of active maintenance and institutional support, independent of geographical proximity to the mainland, in shaping heritage language grammars and their use.

We prove that for bounded, divergence-free vector fields $\boldsymbol{b}$ in $L^1_{loc}((0,1];BV(\mathbb{T}^d;\mathbb{R}^d))$, there exists a unique incompressible measure on integral curves of $\boldsymbol{b}$. We recall the vector field constructed by Depauw in [8], which lies in the above class, and prove that for this vector field, the unique incompressible measure on integral curves exhibits stochasticity.

The economic crisis that started in 2008 has negatively affected European nations to different degrees. The sudden rise in demonstrations particularly in those countries most hard hit by the crisis suggests that grievance theories, dismissed in favour of resource‐based models since the 1970s, might have a role to play in explaining protest behaviour. While most previous studies have tested these theories at the individual or contextual levels, it is likely that mechanisms at both levels are interrelated. To fill this lacuna, this article examines the ways in which individual‐level grievances interact with macro‐level factors to impact on protest behaviour. In particular, it examines whether the impact of individual subjective feelings of deprivation is conditional on contextual macroeconomic and policy factors. It is found that while individual‐level relative deprivation has a direct effect on the propensity to have protested in the last year, this effect is greater under certain macroeconomic and political conditions. Both significant results for the cross‐level interactions are interpreted in terms of their role for opening up political opportunities for protest among those who feel they have been most deprived in the current crisis. These findings suggest that the interaction of the contextual and individual levels should continue to be explored in future studies in order to further clarify the mechanisms underlying protest behaviour.

What are the political conditions affecting male MPs’ willingness to represent women's interests in parliament? This paper explores the role of electoral vulnerability in this regard and analyzes whether male MPs’ re‐election prospects affect their likelihood of paying attention to women's concerns. Theoretically, we expect that male MPs are not blamed if they do not represent women's interests but can gain additional credit for doing so. Thus, male MPs should be more likely to speak on behalf of women if their electoral vulnerability is high and if they need to win additional votes to be re‐elected. Empirically, the paper analyzes the representation of women's issues in the British House of Commons, by using Early Day Motions tabled preceding the General Elections in 2001, 2005, 2010 and 2015. The results show that male MPs are more likely to represent women's interests when their re‐election is at risk.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Party competition sometimes resembles an auction, where parties seek to ‘buy’ elections through promises of economic largesse. In this article, I argue that whether parties engage in this practice will depend on political circumstances, such as the level of ideological competition. Incentives to promise more to voters will also vary depending on a party's electoral prospects: for parties that expect a significant level of government responsibility, promising too much is a risky strategy. I test these arguments by focusing on the spending commitments in party manifestos from 20 countries over the period 1945–2017. In line with expectations, parties tend to make more expansionary election pledges when ideological competition is more muted. In addition, left‐wing parties’ spending commitments are found to be influenced by their projected seat shares (based on opinion polls from before the start of the election campaign) relative to their competitors. Specifically, the stronger a left‐wing party's electoral prospects, the more fiscally conservative it tends to be, and vice versa.

Since the Golden Age of the Welfare State ended, the male‐breadwinner family model traditionally supported by conservative parties has been put under pressure. Familialism appears to be no longer attractive to a changing, more volatile constituency. By comparing four different European countries – namely, Denmark, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom – this work investigates the evolution of the conservative parties’ family policy positions in the post‐Fordist era (1990s–2010s). The article has two goals. First, relying on a multidimensional theoretical framework where both social consumption and social investment policy instruments are at stake, it probes whether conservatives have switched their positions by backing de‐familialism and thus the dual‐earner family model. Second, it explains policy position change or stability over time and cross‐country differences through a multicausal analytical framework.

The content analysis of party manifestos shows that, in the post‐Fordist era, the conservative parties have supported ‘optional familialism’, thus upholding both familiarizing and de‐familiarizing measures. However, such positions are not static. In the 1990s, support for familialism was higher while, since the 2000s, there has been a constant, increasing backing of de‐familialism. While the shift is evident for all the parties, cross‐country differences remain. The comparative historical analysis has pointed out that the specific ‘optional familialism’ positions taken by the conservative parties over time result from the interaction of constituency‐oriented, institutional, contextual and political factors.

Despite some prominent critics, deliberative democrats tend to be optimistic about the potential of deliberative mini‐publics. However, the problem with current practices is that mini‐publics are typically used by officials on an ad hoc basis and that their policy impacts remain vague. Mini‐publics seem especially hard to integrate into representative decision making. There are a number of reasons for this, especially prevailing ideas of representation and accountability as well as the contestatory character of representative politics. This article argues that deliberative mini‐publics should be regarded as one possible way of improving the epistemic quality of representative decision making and explores different institutional designs through which deliberative mini‐publics could be better integrated into representative institutions. The article considers arrangements which institutionalise the use of mini‐publics; involve representatives in deliberations; motivate public interactions between mini‐publics and representatives; and provide opportunities to ex post scrutiny or suspensive veto powers for mini‐publics. The article analyses prospects and problems of these measures, and considers their applicability in different contexts of representative politics.

Natural disasters can affect individuals’ views about the environment, especially when these events are extreme and experienced by people directly (locally). In one of the first comprehensive and systematic attempts, we explore whether a similar relationship exists transnationally – a cross‐border effect stemming from environmental disasters abroad on public opinion ‘at home’. Spatial analyses present robust evidence that people's environmental salience attitudes are substantially driven by disaster‐related deaths in nearby countries. It follows that environmental disasters cannot be treated as isolated incidents within state borders, but they rather have far‐reaching, transnational consequences on public opinion and, potentially, policy. Accordingly, this research adds to our understanding of environmental politics, public opinion, natural disasters and diffusion effects.

When judging how ‘fair’ voting rules are, a fundamental criterion used by both scholars and politicians is their ability or inability to produce proportional results – that is, the extent parties’ seat distribution after the elections accurately reflects their vote shares. How about citizens? Do citizens care about how proportional the outcome is? Or do they judge the outcome solely on the basis of how well (or poorly) their party performed? Taking advantage of a uniquely designed survey experiment, this article investigates the causal effect of proportionality on voter support for voting rules in four countries: Austria, England, Ireland and Sweden. The results show that proportionality drives support for the voting rules not above, but beyond party performance. There is little cross‐country variation, which suggests that proportionality is appreciated in different contexts with little status quo bias. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the causal mechanisms linking electoral rules to voter support.