Legislators may consider the preferences of both business actors and citizens when making trade policy decisions. But when business and citizen preferences diverge, what makes legislators more responsive to one side or the other? We argue that when levels of political engagement are kept constant, legislators are more responsive to citizens than business. This effect should be particularly large for left-leaning legislators and legislators who conceive of themselves as delegates. We use three survey experiments with over 1000 legislators from 47 countries across the globe and qualitative evidence from an open survey question and 30 interviews with legislators to test our expectations. Based on this unique evidence, we find strong support for our expectations. These findings contribute to research on trade policy-making, the interaction between elites and the public in international relations, and responsiveness.

Compensatory policies for the losers of trade are a key feature of the liberal economic order established after the Second World War. Legislators have a variety of policy options to choose. But do political elites and the public have the same attitudes toward compensatory policies? We expect an elite–public gap with the public relatively less supportive of spending policies and more supportive of tax cuts and trade restrictions than political elites. Moreover, we reason that ideology should matter more for elites than the public. Unique data from a survey with legislators in 19 European countries and public opinion surveys in three countries allow us to test this argument. We find that elites and the public indeed differ in their attitudes toward compensatory policies. However, these differences pale in comparison to variation in support for various compensatory policies. These findings shed light on the politics of compensation and on the political attitudes of elites and the public more broadly.

Conventional wisdom holds that terrorism has a wide‐ranging impact on a polity. At the same time, a complementary, yet less extensive body of research discusses the impact of terrorism on the crux of representative democracy, namely its citizens. In contribution to that literature, and to further explore how external shocks affect public opinions, we propose a two‐dimensional analytical framework to examine the effects of the November 2015 terrorist events in Paris and Saint Denis. Drawing from extant scholarship, we argue that we can expect both in‐group solidarity and out‐group hostility to increase in direct response to these events. This study relies on a regression discontinuity design to analyse a representative survey (DREES) that was in the field at the time of the events. Findings are two‐fold. First, and perhaps surprisingly, we find no conclusive evidence of increasing out‐group hostilities as a direct consequence of the terrorist events. Second, we find a definite strengthening of in‐group solidarity indicators following the events. This not only confirms that citizens adjust their opinions in response to environmental stimuli, but also highlights the democratic resilience of citizens, particularly when faced with a collective threat. Altogether, these findings add to our understanding of why and how individual behaviour changes in light of exogenous shocks.

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.

Populist ideology centres around a supposed clash between the ‘honest and upright people’ and the ‘evil and corrupted elite’. Yet, which groups are perceived to constitute ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ likely varies across parties. This research note investigates which factors explain how inclusive or exclusive the conceptions of these two core groups are. Why do some parties define the people in cultural terms, whereas others rely on economic considerations? And why do some parties consider CEOs as elites, whilst others consider academics as elites? We argue that parties’ degree of populism in combination with their ideological orientation allow us to understand these dynamics. In order to investigate these questions systematically, a new wave of the Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey (POPPA) was collected in 2023. Covering 312 political parties in 31 European countries in 2023, a novel module allows us to understand how parties define ‘the people’ and ‘elites’. We find that parties' populism and host ideology are important drivers of their people/elite conceptions. The higher a party's level of populism the more exclusionary its conception of the people is. Nativism is, moreover, associated with the exclusion of societal groups on cultural grounds, while left‐wing economic ideology drives the exclusion of societal groups on economic grounds. With respect to elites, populism is the most important determinant for parties' conceptions of the elite. By contrast, party ideology plays a subordinate role in parties' elite conceptions. This investigation has important implications for our understanding of populist parties, what the nature of their populist appeal is, and how they seek to mobilize in the political arena.

How are parties' ideological positions and levels of populism connected? Existing research either advocates for a U‐shaped relationship between parties' left‐right position and their degree of populism or uses specific dimensions of a two‐dimensional policy space to describe right‐wing populist parties. We provide an integrated perspective to describe parties' degree of populism by arguing that populism is higher when parties put strong emphasis on a collectivist host ideology. This has implications on how these ideologies relate to the two‐dimensional policy space. Combined with salience of policy dimensions, such a perspective allows for a better understanding of the occurrence of populism among right‐ and left‐wing populist parties. Using expert survey data on parties in Europe, we find strong and robust empirical support for the expected patterns.

The connection between populism and democracy is widely researched. Most of the literature focuses on populist actors (e.g., parties, leaders, and governments) as it examines the intricacies of this relationship. Some of the resulting takeaways have become embedded firmly in scholarship and are currently considered accepted knowledge across the discipline. Scholars have only recently started focusing on the individual-level relationship between populism and democracy. As a result, our knowledge remains limited and is often based on the assumption that what holds for populist actors also will hold for populist citizens. The first part of this article briefly reviews the state of the art on the individual-level relationship between populism and democracy. Drawing from this review, we identify several theoretical and empirical gaps and limitations in the literature that future research should address. We conclude that contemporary scholarship has made important contributions, but more nuanced and targeted research is necessary to comprehensively understand the intricacies between populism and democracy on the individual level.