How does industrial decline influence politics? I propose three mechanisms linking industrial decline to voting. First, if unemployment soars as a consequence of a plant closure, this will result in local communities being economically deprived, which leads to lower support for the incumbent. Second, blame attribution should also play an important role since incumbents can be blamed for their handling of plant closures. Third, I argue that if people are compensated, this anti-incumbent effect should be reduced. I leverage the case of the closing of Lindø Steel Shipyard in Denmark to test in a quasi-experimental setting how a plant closure is linked to voting. Leveraging a difference-in-differences (DiD) design with national election data at the municipality level from 2001–2019, I first find that the closing of the shipyard reduced votes for the right-wing incumbent government. Second, I find that the closures increased unemployment in the short to medium term, and unemployment is negatively correlated with votes for the incumbent. Third, relying on survey data and interview data, I showcase that the government was blamed for its handling of the closure and the EU was credited for its support. Fourth, leveraging an event study design, I find that the political effects are not persistent. In the election, after receiving the compensation, the effects become insignificant, which at least suggests that the compensation could have been effective.

Research on the relationship between inequality and political engagement has yielded varying conclusions. Some studies suggest that inequality fosters political action, while others indicate the opposite, and some find no significant connections. This study demonstrates that individuals’ reactions to inequality are influenced by their attribution of the causes of low income. Based on a survey of over 3,700 residents in Hong Kong, a region known for its high levels of inequality, this research finds that blame attribution significantly affects intentions to participate in collective action. Individuals often attribute income inequality to three types of factors: structural, fatalistic, and individualistic. Those who attribute inequality to structural factors are more likely to engage in collective and disruptive actions, whereas those who attribute it to personal factors are less likely to participate. Consequently, reducing inequality can contribute to social stability by decreasing the potential for collective action.

Populism research has found much scholarly and public attention alike in recent years. Most research has focused on how populism can be defined, assessed or even measured. Even though there are emerging studies on populist messages, few of them have paid attention on causally identifying ways in which discourse can affect support for populist actors. This article positions itself within this gap and aims to answer which discursive elements make (non-)populist messages appealing to varying groups of people. To answer this research question, I conducted a novel survey experiment on vote choice in Germany from December 2020 to January 2021 with N = 3325. Respondents were asked to choose between two candidate statements that displayed varying discursive elements. Thus, the experiment causally tested whether people-centric rhetoric, blame attributive languages or populist style focusing on language complexity drive the populist vote. Results show that a neutral form of blame attribution, namely towards politicians, had the highest probability of driving vote choice, irrespective of respondents' underlying ideological preferences or populist attitudes. Simple language nearly always has a negative effect on vote choice, whereas people-centrism adds a positive touch. These results show that there may be an increasing dissatisfaction with democracy that is voiced by blaming political elites for the malfunctioning of society.

Frazier and colleagues, in 2015, proposed the speech-act hypothesis as an inferentially rich pragmatic account for the interpretational flexibility of expressive adjectives (EAs) (e.g., damn, frigging). One pragmatic cue in EA interpretation proposed by Frazier and colleagues is the Culprit-Hypothesis, which predicts that the likelihood of EAs targeting the subject-referent of an utterance increases with the degree of its perceived culpability or blameworthiness in negative events. This article aims to refine the Culprit-Hypothesis by embedding it in a robust theoretical framework based on the psychological models of blame attribution and providing reliable empirical validation. Focusing on the role of intentionality, one of the major components of blame attribution, this article reports a forced-choice study investigating the influence of blameworthiness on EA interpretation. The study followed a 2$ \times $3 within-subject repeated measures design, with sentences manipulated by the factors intentionality (intentional versus unintentional versus underspecified) and EA placement (subject-internal versus object-internal) (The [damn] NOUN1 [intentionally $ \mid $ unintentionally $ \mid $ ϕ] verbs the [damn] NOUN2). Participants (n = 100) read the sentences and selected their preferred interpretation of the EA among the subject-referent, the object-referent and the event-referent. A generalized linear mixed effects model fitted to the data reveals that intentional actions are significantly more likely to result in subject-readings compared to unintentional actions, thus corroborating the Culprit-Hypothesis.

When do cross-national comparisons enable citizens to hold governments accountable? According to recent work in comparative politics, benchmarking across borders is a powerful mechanism for making elections work. However, little attention has been paid to the choice of benchmarks and how they shape democratic accountability. We extend existing theories to account for endogenous benchmarking. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a test case, we embedded experiments capturing self-selection and exogenous exposure to benchmark information from representative surveys in France, Germany, and the UK. The experiments reveal that when individuals have the choice, they are likely to seek out congruent information in line with their prior view of the government. Moreover, going beyond existing experiments on motivated reasoning and biased information choice, endogenous benchmarking occurs in all three countries despite the absence of partisan labels. Altogether, our results suggest that endogenous benchmarking weakens the democratic benefits of comparisons across borders.

Since the inauguration of Mexican democracy in 2000, organised criminal violence had been leaking into the political arena. Yet, it escalated in the 2018 elections, when dozens of local candidates were killed. In most of these cases, the concrete perpetrators and motives remained in the dark. How did Mexican society make sense of this opaque, unprecedented wave of electoral violence? On the basis of a qualitative content analysis of over 1,200 news reports, I examine the structuring power of a shared narrative: the frame of organised crime. By conceiving candidate killings as economic violence within the criminal community, this commonsensical frame of interpretation permitted Mexican society to ‘normalise’ these killings as ‘business as usual’ by criminal organisations.

Are people under economic stress more or less likely to vote, and why? With large observational datasets and a survey experiment involving unemployed Americans, we show that unemployment depresses participation. But it does so more powerfully when the unemployment rate is low, less powerfully when it is high. Whereas earlier studies have explained lower turnout among the unemployed by stressing the especially high opportunity costs these would-be voters face, our evidence points to the psychological effects of unemployment and of campaign messages about it. When unemployment is high, challengers have an incentive to blame the incumbent, thus eliciting anger among the unemployed. Psychologists have shown anger to be an approach or mobilizing emotion. When joblessness is low, campaigns tend to ignore it. The jobless thus remain in states of depression and self-blame, which are demobilizing emotions.

How do citizens attribute blame in the wake of government failure? Does partisanship bias these attributions? While partisan cues may serve as useful guides when citizens are evaluating public policies, those cues are likely to be less informative and more distortionary when evaluating government performance regarding a crisis. We address these questions by examining blame attributions to government appointees for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. We implement an experimental design in a nationally representative survey that builds on previous work in two ways: (1) we manipulate party labels for the same officials in a real-world setting by considering appointees who were nominated at different times by presidents of different parties; and (2) we examine how domain relevance moderates partisan bias. We find that partisan bias in attributions is strongest when officials are domain relevant, a finding that has troubling implications for representative democracy.