Studies of citizens’ satisfaction with democracy have established a connection between satisfaction and how well those citizens’ preferred parties perform in elections. Yet, the question remains whether ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ respond to the same system- and party-level factors when evaluating their political satisfaction. We build on extant literature to consider citizen satisfaction with democracy from the perspective of character valence. Using the Mannheim Eurobarometer trend file and content analysis-based data on parties’ character valence, we find that both winners’ and losers’ satisfaction with the political system is affected by parties’ character valence, but in differing (and somewhat surprising) ways. We find that winners respond to improvements in the character valence of opposition parties, whereas losers demonstrate greater concern with the valence of governing parties.

Interpersonal influence shapes political behavior and attitudes. So far, however, little efforts have been devoted to testing this mechanism comparatively in Europe. This paper aims at explaining differences in influence patterns in three European countries (Italy, Germany, and the UK). Based on works in demography, we argue that in Mediterranean cultures (characterized by high degrees of familism), people are more prone to be affected by attitudes and behaviors of their relatives with respect to other strong ties (e.g., spouses), while in continental, northern Europe, and the UK, this effect is less important. We test this argument using longitudinal data. Consistent with expectations, results show that the influence of relatives in familistic contexts is stronger than in non-familistic ones. At the same time, the spouse effect (namely, the effect of an intimate, non-relative discussant) is particularly strong in non-familistic contexts (and vice versa). In sum, we demonstrate that public opinion studies can be strengthened by theories developed in other social sciences, such as demography.

Has the financial crisis influenced taxes on the rich? In this article, I argue that crisis countries have raised income tax progressivity because of fiscal fairness considerations. I test this claim by analysing a new data set on top marginal personal income tax (PIT) rates for 122 countries from 2006 to 2014, applying matching methods and a difference-in-differences design. The results show that countries with a financial crisis have increased top PIT rates by 4 percentage points. Furthermore, rising public debt only leads to higher top PIT rates when it is crisis-induced. These findings demonstrate that notions of fiscal fairness can still shape progressive taxation in the 21st century.

Public spending arguably increases with the number of parties in government as each party seeks to secure benefits to its target groups. In this study, two factors that affect the budgetary consequences of multiparty government are identified. The first is the distribution of a priori voting power. An uneven distribution of voting power implies that all government parties are not expected to be equally successful in budgetary negotiations. The second is the degree of impartiality of the public sector. If the public sector is characterized by corruption and other forms of partiality, distributive issues can be expected to gain importance in representative politics. An analysis of data from 30 European countries suggests that changes in the number of government parties are associated with changes in public spending in cases where equally powerful parties are in government and the public sector is relatively partial.

This article explores whether immigration plays a role in determining national welfare state effort in 16 European countries. It examines the relationship between stocks of migrants, the foreign-born population, on two different indicators of welfare state effort – social welfare spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) and a welfare generosity index. The nexus between immigration and welfare is a controversial and highly sensitive political issue, and as such it typically divides opinion. Traditionally, it has been argued that increases in immigration create pressures for governments to reduce levels of social welfare provision. By building on theories and results from the political economy literature, this article provides further evidence on the debate through using a fresh approach to operationalize welfare state effort. The empirical results show that the foreign-born population has a positive and statistically significant relationship with social welfare spending and no statistically significant association with the welfare generosity index. The findings provide no evidence to support the hypothesis that the higher levels of immigration lead to reduced levels of social welfare provision. On the contrary, these findings lend support to the view that increasing immigration leads to welfare state expansion rather than retrenchment, and that European welfare states remain resilient in the face of the globalization of migration.

Policies allowing enfranchisement of non-resident citizens (emigrants and their descendants) are now implemented in the majority of states worldwide. A growing number of case studies show that the extension of voting rights to non-resident citizens is often contested among country of origin political parties. However, there is no systematic comparative study of why different political parties support or oppose external voting rights and how this position is framed by the parties. Drawing on a unique data set based on 34 debates across 13 countries, we estimate the extent to which ideology and party family are correlated with the positioning and framing of parties. Among the findings are that the more to the right is a party, the more it tends to support external voting rights, except in the case of radical right parties. The position on emigrant voting rights is largely framed along more pragmatic arguments.

In this paper, we investigate whether income inequality negatively affects voter turnout. Despite some progress, the answer to this question is still debated due to methodological disagreements and differences in the selection of countries and time periods. We contribute to this debate by triangulating data and methods. More specifically, we use three kinds of data to resolve the question: first, we use cross-sectional aggregate data of 21 OECD countries in the time period from 1980 to 2014 to study the relationship between inequality and electoral participation. Second, we zoom in on the German case and examine local data from 402 administrative districts between 1998 and 2017. Focusing on within-country variation eliminates differences that are linked to features of the political system. Finally, we combine survey data with macro-data to investigate the impact of inequality on individual voting. This final step also allows us to test whether the effect of income inequality on voter turnout differs across income groups. Taken together, we offer the most comprehensive analysis of the impact of social inequality on political inequality to date. We corroborate accounts that argue that economic inequality exacerbates participatory inequality.