The notion of ‘place’ has become a central concern in research on the populist radical right (PRR), but scholars seem to have different things in mind when talking about how geography affects individual political attitudes. In our paper, we therefore aim to structure the debate on the impact of place and to understand exactly how place affects PRR attitudes (nativism, right-wing authoritarianism, and populism). Conceptually, we identify four potentially relevant aspects of ‘place’ that underpin much of the current literature: place-related attitudes (localism and resentment), place-specific living conditions, socio-demographic composition, and characteristics unique to a particular place, i.e., its local history and culture. We also discuss how these aspects are related and how they may interact. Empirically, we assess the relative importance of these four aspects of place for PRR sentiment in Germany, a country that is particularly well suited to this type of analysis. Using fine-grained geocoded survey data collected prior to the 2017 election, we find that (1) there is considerable spatial variation and clustering in PRR attitudes, (2) a place’s socio-demographic composition and (3) place resentment account for much of this, while (4) localism has weaker effects. We find (5) no relevant interaction between localism and place resentment, (6) no substantial evidence that mediation through place-related attitudes leads to an underestimation of the other aspects, and (7) no evidence for effects of the unique culture or history of the places we studied. Moreover, (8) location in the former GDR still has a substantial impact, whereas (9) other place-specific conditions (deprivation, demographic decline, migration, rurality) that could be addressed by policy interventions have no or rather weak effects. We conclude that PRR sentiment in ‘places that don’t matter’ results also, though by no means exclusively, from a lack of recognition.

How does media exposure relate to support for radical right populist parties (RRPPs)? We contribute to this classic debate by analyzing the web browsing histories and survey responses of six thousand study participants in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK during the 2019 European Parliament election. Linking direct measures of online news exposure to voting behavior allows us to assess the effects of the salience of issues politicized by RRPPs on their electoral support. The likelihood to vote for RRPPs was higher when the EU was more salient in individual media diets, while exposure to the less salient issue of immigration did not increase the propensity to vote for RRPPs. Alongside consistent results for other party families and interactions with pre-existing voting intentions, the findings indicate that the electoral effects of online media are contingent on the overall salience of a specific issue and voters’ predispositions.

Electoral engineering strategies in majoritarian electoral systems, in particular the possibility to contain insurgent parties by manipulating electoral districts for partisan gain, are key determinants of parties’ positions on the adoption of proportional representation (PR). Providing both qualitative and quantitative evidence, this paper demonstrates that partisan districting can be an effective strategy to protect incumbent parties’ dominant political positions. In addition, it shows how insurgent parties push for the adoption of PR to end the practice of partisan districting. Finally, it demonstrates that incumbents – in the face of increasing electoral threats – cling to the existing majoritarian system if partisan districting allows them to influence vote-seat distortions in their favor. Together, these findings suggest that the possibility to contain insurgent parties by means of partisan districting is an important but overlooked alternative to the adoption of PR. Moreover, by demonstrating that vote-seat distortions moderate the relationship between district-level electoral threats and legislators’ support for PR adoption, this paper offers an important corrective to Stein Rokkan’s influential electoral threat thesis.

How are immigrants’ feelings of inclusion and trust in political institutions affected by interactions with the host society? In a field dominated by observational correlation studies, I use a survey experiment in two national contexts to test how perceptions of discrimination and expressions of pro-immigrant support influence non-Western immigrants’ political trust and national belonging. Following standard experimental procedures to test the hypotheses, I attempt to prime perceptions of group discrimination by asking questions about unfair treatment. Expressions of pro-immigrant support are, in turn, primed with facts about public and institutional support for immigrants’ rights. The results from the survey experiment are in line with expectations from prior work in some subgroups and underline the importance of equal treatment to achieve social cohesion. They also paint a rather complex picture of discrimination and its psychological impact. These findings have substantial implications for our understanding of host societies’ roles in immigrant inclusion.

To stretch an argument means to make a political argument that is slightly (but not glaringly) invalid. I add to existing research, which focuses on the analysis of facts and stark binary views of validity by introducing the concept of argument-stretching, which identifies subtle violations of the validity of arguments. Using this conceptual foundation, I outline an impression-formation theory to explain the impact of argument-stretching on public opinion. I suggest that people spontaneously form negative impressions of stretched arguments, and that they add these impressions to a cumulative tally of satisfaction with the argument. Finally, people translate the negative effect of argument-stretching on their account satisfaction into reduced support for the politician who stretched the argument and the policy justified by it. I confirm the hypothesized direct effects of argument-stretching on policy support and politician support in three experimental studies, and I also find evidence for the mediating effect of account satisfaction.

Political parties commonly experience internal disagreements. Recently, evidence is accumulating that outright internal discord makes a party much less attractive to voters. However, we do not understand well when citizens perceive a party to be internally conflicted in the first place. We here explain citizens’ perceptions from a democratic life cycle perspective: Factors related to the periodic conduct of elections induce higher levels of intra-party conflict and make it more visible to citizens. To test this argument, we combine survey data on citizens’ perceptions of political parties in Germany spanning 16 years with indicators moderating (the visibility of) intra-party conflict. The analysis shows that citizens perceive more internal conflict when parties are heterogenous, when they are governing, when election day is distant, and when electoral losses accumulate. This demonstrates the recurring patterns in citizens’ perceptions of political parties and suggests self-reinforcing dynamics between citizen assessments and election outcomes.

Scholars of European integration are primarily interested in explaining change and variation over time. Indeed, given that integration has progressed over 50 years and competences have been transferred to the European level in policy fields, including energy, fast and coordinated action in the face of a major external threat might have been anticipated. Yet, as this article documents, member states struggled to establish a cohesive and solidary European response to the 2022 gas crisis, just as they had failed to cooperate effectively during the 1973 oil crisis. Building on recent literature on European polity development and integration through crises, this article argues that differences in national crisis affectedness and energy structures hampered cooperation. Such asymmetries became particularly visible on the part of France and Germany, the Union’s two largest member states, who could have provided regional political leadership. Consequently, both the 1973 and 2022 energy crises led to very limited steps in European integration and collectively suboptimal policy outcomes, such as high energy prices and uneven access to energy resources.

The role of the president varies between political systems, and so does public opinion on presidents. One of the most evident factors distinguishing presidents in different systems is the constitutional strength of the presidency, which should impact how presidents are perceived by the people. Public opinion on presidents has mainly been studied in the context of classical presidential regimes such as the USA and Latin American countries, and we lack systematic empirical research on presidential popularity in other regime types and in the context of the presidents’ constitutional powers. This article addresses this research gap by analysing whether the level of presidential powers explain variation in presidential popularity across different constitutional settings. Drawing on public opinion surveys and relevant contextual data from 15 countries, the results show that a higher level of presidential popularity is associated with weaker presidency and that the impact of the economy and electoral cycle is conditioned by the level of presidential powers.

Recent theories of democratic representation push beyond ‘minimalist’ notions that only rely on periodic elections to connect officials and constituents. For example, Jane Mansbridge (2019) calls for ‘recursive representation’, which seeks ongoing, two-way interaction between representatives and their constituents. Given the scale and complexity of modern representative democracies, how can such ambitious proposals be translated into practice? We analyze two Deliberative Town Halls (DTHs) convened with a Federal Member of Australian Parliament in 2020 to discuss a complex issue, mitochondrial donation, ahead of a parliamentary debate and conscience vote on this issue. Drawing on interviews with participants, we argue that democratic innovations such as DTHs can contribute to realizing recursive representation when three criteria are met: authenticity, inclusion, and impact. We discuss the significance of each criterion and the role of DTHs in advancing recursive representation in a parliamentary system.

Specialized anti-corruption agencies (ACAs) aim to address corruption problems when conventional institutional mechanisms are dysfunctional. Yet, we still lack thorough understanding of the conditions that enable ACAs to withstand undue influences of the overarching political regime. Informed by the judicial politics literature, we examine the value of public opinion in empowering ACAs. Leveraging the evolving political conditions of Hong Kong, we argue that a lack of public support for other government organs offers opportunities for an ACA to distinguish itself from the rest of the regime and establish operational independence. We find that a signature ACA of Hong Kong, created by the British colonial government, has been uniquely sensitive to public complaints of corruption. The agency is the most responsive when other government branches are perceived to be lacking integrity. Also, negative appraisals of the political regime encourage the ACA’s institutional functions and increase the degree of enforcement discretion entrusted to it. Our findings suggest a mechanism of ACA empowerment whereby the public is committed to sustaining agency independence because of their distrust and the unpopularity of other government organs. Therefore, potential institutional threats posed by an unpopular regime to the ACA may actually strengthen the latter’s power and autonomy.

Recent research on clientelism has focused on the varieties of clientelism. They suggest that clientelistic exchanges differ in terms of the expected length of iterations, whereby politicians deliver benefits to voters in exchange for political support. Using newly collected V-Party data (1,844 political parties from 165 countries, 1970–2019), we identify two prominent types of clientelism that recent studies have suggested: relational clientelism and single-shot clientelism. By demonstrating that our measures of clientelism outperform existing cross-national indices, we suggest that it is important to unpack clientelistic linkages at the party level to grasp the fine-grained differences in clientelism across parties within states. We then apply our measures to the analysis of the relationship between economic development and clientelism, one of the major topics in the clientelism study. Our analysis finds that relational clientelism persists even in relatively developed countries, whereas the effect of economic development on single-shot clientelism has a curvilinear relationship. Our applications of the new measures of clientelism also show that the gap in clientelistic practices between ruling and opposition parties varies depending on the types of clientelism, tenure lengths of incumbents, and the degree of political centralization.

In the literature on the determinants of party unity, one pathway has remained largely neglected: division of labour. Given their workload, members of parliament (MPs) are only thoroughly concerned with a subset of policies. We argue that this results in MPs casting fewer dissenting votes on matters within their area of specialization since they have had the opportunity to shape the party line there. Regression analyses using data for the German Bundestag support this hypothesis, including four important refinements: Not only the current but also past membership in the responsible committee reduces an MP’s defection probability. Additionally, this pattern is more pronounced for policy spokespersons and for less consequential, i.e., non-legislative votes as well as for issues less salient to the MP’s party. The results have implications for our understanding of MPs’ legislative behaviour, the functioning of parliaments as institutions and for the relationship between parties, MPs and voters.

Ministers may be powerful policy initiators, but they are not equally powerful. Cabinet control mechanisms have become a crucial part of cabinet governance, which can serve to contain agency loss and consequently constrain ministers in the policymaking process. However, empirical studies have not focused on the impact of such control mechanisms on individual ministers’ political outcomes. I turn attention to certain cabinet committees as intra-cabinet control mechanisms and argue that members of these enjoy a policymaking advantage compared to nonmembers. Analyzing ministers’ number of laws proposed to parliament in Denmark from 1975 to 2022, I look beyond parties as unitary actors and provide evidence for this causal relationship. Membership of the Economic Committee increases ministers’ legislative activity. Thus, even within parties in cabinet, ministers have unequal possibilities to act as policy-seeking. These findings offer new insights into political parties in governments, cabinet governance, policymaking, and legislative processes.

How does a terrorist attack affect party preferences? Based on existing theories, we would either expect incumbent parties to benefit because of a rally-effect, or populist radical right parties (PRRPs) to gain due to a radicalization of voters’ preferences. These competing theories are tested with a unique dataset of a large sample of voters’ responses on a Voting Advice Application. We do so using a novel way to leverage exogenous events using big public opinion data. We show that a terrorist attack has a positive effect for the main incumbent party, even when voters’ positions on the issues owned by the PRRPs become more radicalized. This means that during crises, voters rally around the flag and prefer prominence over policy proximity.

The Covid-19 pandemic placed responsibility on the European Union (EU) to effectively mitigate this common challenge. An important aspect of the common fight against the virus was the collective procurement of vaccines. The initially slow process of vaccine delivery may have caused overall frustration within societies and may also have had a profound effect on people’s assessment of their country’s EU membership. This paper examines this assumption via unique panel data collected in Germany in three waves between November 2020 and August 2021. We show that citizens evaluated their country’s EU membership negatively especially when the EU’s progress on vaccinations was in its early stages. In addition, public assessment was particularly negative when vaccination progress was compared to the situation in the United Kingdom (UK). Overall, our findings point to volatile levels of EU support depending on respondents’ perceptions of the success of the UK outside the EU.

Research on intra-coalition control shows that monitoring increases with the ideological distance between coalition partners. However, the focus of scholarship has been primarily on parliamentary regimes, not mixed regimes. In mixed regimes, intra-coalition control becomes more complex due to a dual executive. Parties must simultaneously monitor each other and the directly elected Head of Executive (HoE). This article examines intra-coalition control in mixed regimes by analyzing parliamentary questions from 21 German city councils. The German local level resembles a mixed regime. The executive consists of the coalition cabinet supported by the council majority and the directly elected mayor as the HoE. The results show that the division of governmental responsibilities affects intra-coalition control. When a coalition party is aligned with the HoE, the balance of power within the coalition is affected, and the other partners intensify controlling the aligned party. Additionally, policy divisiveness and issue salience are driving factors for intra-coalition control.

The party–money nexus has long excited concerns about corruption and undue influence. However, much of the scholarship in this area has focused on the funding parties receive from external donors or the state. One area of party financing that is underexplored is that of party-controlled commercial enterprises. We examine the nature and scale of the commercial activities engaged in by the two major governing Australian parties: Labor and the Liberals. We find that while commercial activities are long-standing practices, they have diversified over time, becoming more sophisticated and professionalized. Importantly, some of these activities have become decoupled from the proper purposes of parties. The upscaling of party fundraising practices introduces new tensions for parties – both normatively and practically.