Religion has long been considered an important determinant of voting behaviour. However, the secularisation of Western societies has changed its role. Secularisation not only limits the political relevance of religion, it may also affect the nature of religious cleavages themselves. While extant literature suggests that differences between religious denominations are in decline, with regard to differences between religious and non-religious voters there are two divergent expectations, (1) that these differences are also in decline and (2) that there is an increased polarisation between the religious and the non-religious. For the latter expectation, evidence has already been found regarding the United States. In this paper, we examine whether a similar change can be observed in Western Europe. Combining data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and information on parties’ positions from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES), we assess the nature of over-time changes in the connection between religion and the vote choice. The results point to an increased polarisation between members of a Christian church and the non-religious, however, we also find that non-Christians are more similar to the non-religious than to Christians. We also uncover a growing division between Catholics and Protestants that does not fit common expectations. These findings challenge earlier work on the political consequences of secularisation and lead to new research questions.

Issue ownership is an important determinant of the vote, and it is electorally beneficial for parties to build a strong reputation on their core issues. Even though issue ownership has already been studied extensively in the party literature, we know less about how citizens form ownership perceptions. We contribute to this literature by means of two studies on the connection between party behaviour and perceptions of issue ownership, with an empirical focus on issue competence reputations of parties. In Study 1, we combine party‐level information about issue attention, positions and performance with data on competence perceptions from a wide range of national election studies. Study 2 is a pre‐registered conjoint experiment designed to examine the causal link between party behaviour and perceived competence. Our results point to significant effects for all three hypothesised sources of competence reputations. Moving beyond previous work that has argued that competence reputations are mostly stable over time, after accounting for the variation due to parties' popularity, our results show that they fluctuate in the short term and that parties have some level of control over how they are perceived.

A large and growing body of research draws attention to the rising salience of socio‐cultural and identitarian issues and, potentially, the emergence of a new political cleavage that divides voters on those issues. However, the micro‐foundations of this transformation are less well understood. Here we take a voter‐perspective to evaluate how party competition has been restructured in the eyes of the voter. We leverage measures of citizens’ self‐reported probabilities to vote for alternative political parties in the European Election Study voter surveys between 1999 and 2019 in order to map electoral affinity and opposition among party families. We estimate to what extent spatial location on the economic left–right dimension and the GAL‐TAN dimension explain the patterns that emerge, and how this has changed over time. Our results provide evidence of a substantial shift in voter assessment from party competition structured along the economic left–right dimension to competition structured along the GAL‐TAN dimension. We also find great separation of TAN parties from other parties, with the deepest antipathy between the TAN parties and greens.

Scholars have investigated the characteristics of volatile voters ever since the first voter surveys were carried out and they have paid specific attention to the role of political sophistication on vote switching. Nevertheless, the exact nature of this relationship is still unclear. With increasing volatility over the past decades this question has furthermore grown in relevance. Is the growing unpredictability of elections mostly driven by sophisticated voters making well‐considered choices or is the balance of power in the hands of unsophisticated ‘floating voters’? Several scholars have argued that even under conditions of increasing volatility switching is still mostly confined to changes to ideologically close parties. Most researchers, however, have used rather crude measures to investigate this ‘leap’ between parties. To advance research in this field, this article directly models the ideological distance bridged by volatile voters when investigating the link between political sophistication and volatility. This is done using Comparative Study of Electoral systems (CSES) data that encompass a broad sample of recent parliamentary elections worldwide. Results indicate that voters with an intermediate level of political knowledge are most likely to switch overall. When taking into account the ideological distance of party switching, however, the confining impact of political knowledge on the vote choices made is clearly dominant, resulting in a linear decrease of the distance bridged as voters become more knowledgeable.

Experimental research has shown that political parties often, but not always, suffer reputational costs when they change their policy positions. Yet, it is not clear who accepts and who rejects party policy change. Using newly collected observational data from five European countries (Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom), we examine the individual‐level determinants of party policy change. We examine support for policy change with a new survey item that directly captures party policy change acceptance. We theorise that acceptance of party policy change varies as a function of individuals' political attitudes such as their level of interest in politics and their ideological positions, as well as their views about democratic decision‐making. Although we find that many citizens agree that change is sometimes necessary and understand the conditions and constraints that lead parties to alter their positions, we also show that populist attitudes have a strong negative effect on accepting party policy change. A textual analysis of an open‐ended survey item furthermore indicates that those who perceive party policy change negatively, associate change with opportunism and power‐seeking. Our results imply that even though parties have some leeway to change their positions when external conditions require them to do so, populist beliefs and anti‐elite sentiment make citizens rather sceptical of the motivations that parties have when they alter their positions.

When asked to place themselves on a left‐right scale, men and women tend to take different positions. Over time, however ideological gender differences have taken a different form. While women were traditionally more right‐leaning than men, from around the mid‐1990s onwards they have been found to take positions to the left of men. Using an originally constructed dataset that includes information on the left‐right self‐placement of more than 2.5 million respondents in 36 OECD countries between 1973 and 2018, I empirically verify how the ideological gender gap has evolved since. The results show, first, that while women have shifted to the left since the late 1970s, the pace of this change has strongly diminished since the late 1990s. Second, there is important between‐country variation in the size of the reversal in the ideological gender gap. Third, with the exception of the Silent generation and the Baby‐boomers, newer generations of women have not taken more left‐leaning positions than generations before them.

A close connection between public opinion and policy is considered a vital element of democracy. In representative systems, elections are assumed to play a role in realising such congruence. If those who participate in elections are not representative of the public at large, it follows that the reliance on elections as a mechanism of representation entails a risk of unequal representation. In this paper, we evaluate whether voters are better represented by means of an analysis of policy responsiveness to voters and citizens in democracies worldwide. We construct a uniquely comprehensive dataset that includes measures of citizens’ and voters’ ideological (left–right) positions, and data on welfare spending in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries since 1980. We find evidence of policy responsiveness to voters, but not to the public at large. Since additional tests suggest that the mechanism of electoral turnout does not cause this voter‐policy responsiveness, we outline alternate mechanisms to test in future research.

For a number of decades now, scholars have been indicating that ties between citizens and parties are eroding. As a consequence, electoral behaviour has become more volatile and also more unpredictable. The consequences of this process of change on parties’ strategic behaviour have, however, received little attention. In this article, the impact of dealignment on parties’ strategic behaviour is examined, with the focus being on the extent to which parties are responsive to the mean voter. The expectation of dealignment allowing parties ‘to move around more freely’ leads to the hypothesis that parties are more responsive in a context of dealignment. The analyses provide evidence that is in line with this expectation. Ideological responsiveness is conditioned by the level of volatility in the electorate. The conclusion to draw from these results is that dealignment, which profoundly affects voters’ behaviour, leads parties to become more responsive to the mean voter.

Although the theory of retrospective voting receives wide support in the literature on voting behaviour, less agreement exists on voters’ time horizon when assessing the government's performance – that is, whether voters are myopic. Previous studies on voter myopia tend to focus on aggregate‐level measures of the economy, or use an experimental approach. Using panel data, this article offers the first investigation into voter myopia that uses individual‐level evaluations of government performance in a representative survey at several points during the electoral cycle. The study focuses on The Netherlands, but it also provide tests of the generalisability and robustness of the findings, and a replication in the American context. The results indicate that voter satisfaction early in the government's term adds to explaining incumbent voting. Thus, rather than the myopic voter, evidence is found of the abiding voter – steady at her or his post, evaluating government performance over a long length of time.

Recent research draws attention to parties’ reliance on group appeals. Such group appeals are a tool that parties and candidates use to strengthen the association between voters’ social group membership and their electoral support. However, what we know about the effects of such appeals on voters is mostly limited to class appeals. Using two survey experimental studies among British voters (N=1,500; N=3,200), we shed light on the generalizability of the effects of symbolic group appeals for other types of social groups. We show that group appeals based on class, place, education, age, gender, and ethnicity all shape candidate support. We also theorize that effects are conditioned by respondents’ strength of identity and their deservingness perceptions and show that the latter are key to explaining voters’ reactions to group appeals. These findings clarify the scope and conditions of group appeals’ effects and advance our understanding of group politics.

Obtaining losers’ consent after an election is often taken for granted in liberal democracies. However, it can pose a real challenge for any type of democratic decision-making in which participants hold conflicting views about the issues of the day. In this research note, we examine losers’ reactions to the votes taken in a citizen deliberative assembly. In such an assembly, much effort is devoted to informing the participants about the merits and limits of various options and ensuring that they form their own reasoned opinions about the issue. Based on this information, people are bound to reach different conclusions, and any vote on a specific option therefore generates winners and losers. While there is a large literature exploring the winner-loser gap in elections, we know little about how participants in a deliberative assembly react when they realize that the assembly chooses a different position than theirs. We leverage data from a citizen assembly held in Canada. We find a high degree of satisfaction with the conduct of the assembly, among both winners and losers.

The ideological and issue positions of parties are known to shape citizens’ political attitudes and voting behaviour. One important way to obtain estimates of parties’ positions is to ask experts to place parties on salient ideological dimensions. The Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) has been collecting such estimates for democracies in Europe and elsewhere. CHES Canada adds to this project by providing estimates of party positions and characteristics of Canadian federal parties and provincial parties in Ontario and Quebec. This note introduces this new data source, clarifies how the data were collected and illustrates how the data can be used to (comparatively) study party politics in Canada.

The extent to which citizens comply with newly enacted public health measures such as social distancing or lockdowns strongly affects the propagation of the virus and the number of deaths from COVID-19. It is however very difficult to identify non-compliance through survey research because claiming to follow the rules is socially desirable. Using three survey experiments, we examine the efficacy of different ‘face-saving’ questions that aim to reduce social desirability in the measurement of compliance with public health measures. Our treatments soften the social norm of compliance by way of a short preamble in combination with a guilty-free answer choice making it easier for respondents to admit non-compliance. We find that self-reported non-compliance increases by up to +11 percentage points when making use of a face-saving question. Considering the current context and the importance of measuring non-compliance, we argue that researchers around the world should adopt our most efficient face-saving question.

While youth suffrage is widely debated, the causal effects of being eligible to vote on adolescents' political attitudes are less well known. To gain insights into this question, we leverage data from a real-life quasi-experiment of voting at 16 in the city of Ghent (Belgium). We compare the attitudes of adolescents that were entitled to vote with their peers that just fell below the age cut-off. We also examine the effects of the enfranchisement at 18-years-old. While we find an effect of youth enfranchisement on attention to politics, there is no evidence for an effect of enfranchisement on political engagement overall.

Recent publications argue that the traditional gender gap in voting has decreased or reversed in many democracies. However, this decrease may apply only to some types of elections. Building on prior studies, this article hypothesizes that although women participate at the same or higher rates than men in national elections, they participate less in supranational elections. The authors investigate this possibility empirically by analyzing the evolution of the gender gap in voter turnout in elections to the European Parliament (EP). The article makes three important contributions. First, it shows the presence and stability of the traditional gender gap in EP elections. Secondly, it finds that gender differences in political interest are the main source of this gender gap. Thirdly, these gender differences in political interest are, in turn, context dependent. They are strongly associated with cultural gender differences, which are captured through differences in boys’ and girls’ maths scores.

Government cohesiveness is known to moderate retrospective voting. While previous work on this topic has focused on characteristics of the government, we build on the literature on clarity of responsibility and the literature on valence to argue that the extent to which government and opposition are ideologically distinct also moderates retrospective voting. Two alternative expectations follow from these two theoretical perspectives. While the clarity of responsibility framework leads to the expectation that a larger difference between government and opposition will strengthen retrospective voting, the valence literature presumes that retrospective voting is stronger when ideological differences are small. Using the data of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project, we find evidence that is in line with the clarity of responsibility framework: the higher the degree of ideological polarization between government and opposition, the larger the effect of retrospective performance evaluations on the vote.

Changes in voters' behavior and in the campaign strategies that political parties pursue are likely to have increased the importance of campaigns on voters' electoral choices. As a result, scholars increasingly question the usefulness and predictive power of structural forecasting models, that use information from “fundamental” variables to make an election prediction several months before Election Day. In this paper, we empirically examine the expectation that structural forecasting models are increasingly error-prone. For doing so, we apply a structural forecasting model to predict elections in six established democracies. We then trace the predictive power of this model over time. Surprisingly, our results do not give the slightest indication of a decline in the predictive power of structural forecasting models. By showing that information on long-term factors still allows making accurate predictions of electoral outcomes, we question the assumption that campaigns matter more now than they did in the past.