Research indicates a lack of presence of lower socioeconomic status (SES) individuals in parliament, hindering their representation due to a lack of shared experiences between low SES citizens and representatives. Theorists argue that understanding low SES experiences depends not only on representatives’ own SES but also on those closest to them. However, little is known about whether elected representatives count lower SES citizens in their intimate network. Surveying 1,185 representatives across 13 Western countries, we examine the educational attainment and social class of their parents, partner, and two closest friends. In none of these countries do representatives’ ties mirror the share of lower SES citizens in the population. The results are only slightly better when we examine how many representatives have at least a single lower SES tie. We also find evidence for homophily. High SES representatives tend to associate with high SES individuals, and they tend to do that much more than high SES citizens associate with other high SES citizens. This shows that representatives who could benefit most from lower SES perspectives in their personal networks often lack them.

Expectations about election outcomes shape voter behavior, yet little research has examined how expectations regarding the post-election formateur influence voting decisions. This study examines the conditions under which voters engage in formateur optimization – strategically supporting parties with a realistic chance of forming the government rather than their most preferred party. We argue that while formateur uncertainty plays a key role, its effect depends on voters’ preferences regarding their most preferred party and their preferred formateur. Using modules 1–5 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) and German pre-election surveys (1998–2021), we find that formateur optimization is more likely in tightly contested elections. However, our results also show that voters’ preferences moderate the effect of formateur uncertainty: formateur optimization remains low even under high uncertainty when voters strongly favor a non-formateur party over the formateur’s party. Furthermore, we find that voters who expect their preferred formateur candidate to lose behave similarly to those uncertain about the outcome – and still engage in formateur optimization. These findings highlight the interplay between expectations and preferences in shaping voting decisions in coalition systems, offering new insights into voter calculations in multiparty democracies.

Rising inequalities have been described as fertile ground for populist parties across the world. In this article, we investigate the role that inequality perception plays in strengthening populist attitudes and increasing support for populist parties. Using data from the International Social Survey Programme, we find that those who perceive greater inequality in society are more likely to support populist parties. To explore the causal relationship, we also conduct a survey experiment in Denmark, Germany, and Italy, randomly exposing participants to factual information about the wealth distribution. The results show that the perception of inequality can increase populist attitudes, but does not immediately affect the likelihood of voting for populist parties in this context. The findings speak to current debates on how inequalities and their perception became a pre-condition for the rise of populist parties all over Europe.

Combining key elements of classical and constructivist approaches to representation, this article suggests a novel reconceptualisation of political representation. Developed through participatory agency research with people in socio-economically difficult situations and anchored in people’s lived experiences and sense-making processes, the representative relationship is redefined as a pragmatic and solution-oriented partnership between representatives and the represented. Expanding the classical Pitkinian model, it enables representatives to be better informed about how to address peoples’ concerns. In doing so, it advances the notion of dynamic political representation, where the represented are not passive principals but active partners in decision-making. While we uphold the classical principle of acting in the interests of the represented, we reconceptualise these interests as dynamic and continuously evolving – a perspective consistent with constructivist thought. This research aligns with scholarly calls to rethink representation and revise the roles of the representatives and the represented, fostering meaningful and effective engagement. Our empirical findings highlight the urgency of reform for people in socio-economically difficult situations and underscores the broader relevance of these insights, in a context of increasing legitimacy deficits and rising discontent with current modes of representation in contemporary democracies.

While political opposition to economic globalisation has increased, several governments have adopted stricter unilateral interventions in global supply chains in the name of sustainability, despite their potentially significant economic costs. We argue that these policy choices are partly driven by politicians’ incentives to align with domestic public opinion. In particular, new information disclosure rules enable governments to implement market access restrictions compliant with binding trade liberalisation commitments while (a priori) obscuring their costs to voters. We assess the latter argument with original survey data and experiments with representative samples from the twelve major OECD importing economies (N = 24,000). Indeed, citizens expect substantive benefits while discounting costs from these new regulations, resulting in majority support for rather stringent standards. We further observe that these relationships are muted in countries with high trade exposure. These findings suggest that governments may strategically implement unilateral policies with high-cost obfuscation to garner domestic voter support, driving regulatory proliferation in international economic relations.

Traditional sexualities are in decline. Across the world, individuals in liberal democracies are increasingly identifying with sexual identities that challenge the heteronormative status quo. Today, an average of one in five young people identify with a sexually inclusive identity. How do members of the sexual majority group in liberal democracies respond to this change? Women are far more likely to express public support for sexual minorities, but does this public support translate into private behaviour? Do women accommodate potential partners with gender-inclusive dating preferences more than men? Relying on three novel pre-registered experiments – a double-list experiment, a visual conjoint, and a vignette study – I demonstrate that: i) the sexual majority group penalises sexually inclusive individuals on the dating market, and ii) women in the sexual majority group are far more likely to reject gender-inclusive and sexually inclusive partners compared to men. Empirically, I show that the sizeable difference in the penalty exhibited against sexually inclusive men, an empirical expectation equally anticipated by men and women, can be explained by women perceiving sexually inclusive men as deviating from traditional gender norms. These findings reveal a critical disconnect between public support for LGBTQ+ inclusion and actual behaviour in intimate contexts. They highlight how entrenched expectations of gender-congruent behaviour continue to shape interpersonal dynamics, even in ostensibly liberal societies. As a result, sexually inclusive men face distinct and intensified pressures to conform, which may help explain patterns of identity suppression among young men.

This study examines the role of political campaigns in reducing voter susceptibility to framing effects. The case chosen is the 2022 EU defence opt-out referendum in Denmark. Using a novel survey experiment design that exposed voters to arguments at the start and the end of the campaign, we were able to directly test the impact of a real-world campaign on voter susceptibility to frames. The findings reveal a notable reduction in framing effects. Initially, loss-related framed arguments swayed voters, but this impact waned at the campaign’s end. Our analysis suggests that the campaign provided voters with information and arguments that made them less susceptible to framing effects and instead empowered voters to make informed decisions on the referendum based on their own attitudes towards the EU. In the conclusions, we encourage further research on susceptibility to elite messages in real-world settings.

Two interrelated trends have narrowed the class backgrounds of policymakers over the past decades: a decreasing share of working-class MPs and a parallel rise of highly educated ‘career politicians’ with little occupational experience outside politics. Although these trends risk aggravating representational inequality, we know little about their causes. Focusing on parties as the main gatekeepers to parliament, we analyse how the class background of political candidates influences the chances of being nominated in electorally safer positions. Based on original data on MPs’ backgrounds and the German GLES Candidate Study, we show that candidates with a working-class background have lower chances to be placed in safe positions, especially in center-right parties. Careerists, in contrast, enjoy systematic advantages in the nomination process, at least in left-wing parties. Lacking individual resources is thus not the only obstacle to working-class representation, but political parties are important actors in shaping the class composition of parliaments.

Public service institutions such as the judiciary, universities, and the police force derive their legitimacy from their impartial functioning. Yet, around the world, such institutions are increasingly accused of holding a left- or right-wing bias. This study examines to what extent citizens perceive ideological bias among the actors working in public service institutions, and what explains these perceptions. We collected original survey data in five European countries (Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, Poland, and the Netherlands), measuring citizen perceptions of left-right bias among the actors working in six public service institutions. We find that bias perceptions are widespread, with some institutional actors (scientists, schoolteachers, and journalists) being associated more to the left, and others (police, judges) more to the right. Bias perceptions are more common among citizens with more political interest, lower levels of education and income, and ideologically extreme positions. Crucially, we find that the (left-right) direction of perceived bias depends on one’s own (left-right) position, such that left- and right-leaning citizens tend to associate institutional actors with the opposite (‘hostile’) ideology. Our analyses reveal cross-national and cross-institutional variation in bias perceptions and suggest that public service institutions can become politicised in the eyes of citizens. This highlights the need for further research into the contextual drivers of bias perceptions and their implications for perceived institutional legitimacy.

Affective polarization among citizens is often attributed to the harsh rhetoric and personal attacks that politicians direct at one another. However, the influence of elite rhetoric on affective polarization may work in both directions. We theorize that politicians can reduce affective polarization by making positive or respectful statements about their political opponents. A preregistered survey experiment with 2,000 citizens provides strong support for this expectation. Politicians’ congenial messages about their opponents significantly reduce affective polarization on two distinct measures. Specifically, the experimental treatments reduce citizens’ negative emotions toward outpartisans, as well as their desire to socially distance themselves from such outpartisans. The depolarizing effect of such messages does not depend on the political alignment of either the politician or the citizen, nor does it necessarily require high levels of political trust.

Subjective group relative deprivation (SGRD) is a powerful driver of political protest and support for radical parties. Yet, we lack insights into whether such subjective perceptions of disadvantage attack the very core of democratic legitimacy, that is, citizens’ support for democracy. Against this backdrop, we investigate how SGRD relates to diffuse democratic support. We argue that perceptions of being systematically disadvantaged fuel disaffection with and resentment against the prevailing democratic system, whereas authoritarian systems with their strongmen leadership appear appealing as they promise a stronger in-group protection and pursue more confrontational in-group-out-group relations, which both can be understood as coping strategies to overcome an unfair disadvantage. Employing original – cross-sectional and panel – survey data, we show that SGRD has the potential to undermine citizens’ support for democracy across six European countries in 2020–2022. Our study highlights the negative impact of subjective disadvantage on support for democracy by combining literature from political psychology and political economy.

How do far-right actors influence mainstream parties over time? Previous research shows that mainstream parties contribute to the electoral success of far-right parties through coalitions or policy alliances. However, a long-term perspective on the influence of far-right actors, including parties, civil society organisations, and social movements, on mainstream parties’ communication is lacking. This article investigates how far-right actors and issues have influenced mainstream parties’ communication in Germany since the 1990s. Using automated text analysis, we analyse 520,408 articles from six newspapers. First, we semi-automatically collect far-right actors and mainstream parties and implement a structural topic model to analyse their issue agendas. Second, we use time-series analysis to examine agenda-setting effects and their drivers. The results show that far-right influence on mainstream parties’ communication has increased, particularly among opposition parties and around issues of Islam and migration. Notably, the agenda-setting effect cuts across party ideologies, indicating mainstream parties’ impact on the rise of the far right in democracies.

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.

Why do governments ban some extremist organisations and not others? To answer this question, this article investigates the banning of far-right groups in Germany, the archetype of ‘militant democracy’, where there are laws and institutions that protect a state’s democratic order through selective and qualified restrictions of certain political rights. The study draws on data about far-right organisations mentioned in federal security agency reports since 1990. Two-step fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) reveals that situations of high far-right visibility are necessary to take banning action. Within such situations, there are four sufficient combinations of organisational conditions that lead to banning action: Germany has imposed bans on neo-Nazi groups, longstanding organisational hubs in the far-right scene, aggressive militant organisations, and neo-Nazi sham parties. Two follow-on case studies identify related causal mechanisms underlying these sufficiency patterns. The article shows that Germany’s militant democracy practices are not applied as a matter of principle to every far-right organisation susceptible to a ban, but rather are used more pragmatically. This pragmatic approach implies that state actors should be especially attentive to the efficacy of using bans to disrupt and diminish extremist threats. Although there is some evidence of state actors considering efficacy, there are also indications that banning is sometimes a tool of politics rather than a targeted response to threats.

Under what conditions citizens accept public institutions as legitimate authorities is a key question in political science. Recent accounts suggest that populist citizens reject international organisations (IOs) as distant, elitist, and undemocratic. Conversely, technocratic citizens should favour IOs as they represent the pinnacle of depoliticised, expertise-driven decision-making. In this article, we provide the first joint analysis of technocratic and populist attitudes as drivers of attitudes towards IOs. We analyse a unique survey conducted in five European countries that covers four IOs and ask how individual populist and technocratic attitudes influence attitudes towards IOs. We find only conditional evidence for a structural association between technocratic and populist and IO attitudes, and credible evidence that country-specific experiences with populism in power moderate these associations. Our contribution has important implications for our understanding of citizen attitudes towards various forms of political representation and the legitimacy of IOs.

Despite numerous studies demonstrating a winner–loser gap in voter satisfaction with democracy, the temporal dynamics of its initial emergence remain poorly understood. This study introduces a new framework, distinguishing between short- and long-term effects. Short-term effects refer to immediate attitudinal shifts among winners and losers triggered directly by the establishment of the result. Meanwhile, long-term effects unfold gradually thereafter, through processes like cue-taking and motivated reasoning, polarizing voter attitudes over an extended period following the election. Leveraging survey data coincidentally collected during elections, the empirical analysis provides evidence for both effects. However, it is the long-term mechanisms that predominantly explain the gap’s emergence. Notably, in elections where a government transition occurred, a new gap did not materialize until a few weeks after the outcome solidified. These findings illustrate the temporal complexity of voter reactions, carrying significant implications for addressing challenges related to system support during election periods.

Support for fundamental political rights is a defining feature of liberal democracy. Crises may undermine citizen support for these rights. Yet, existing research does not often distinguish support for ‘illiberal’ policies that encroach on fundamental political rights from other ‘intrusive’ crisis policy responses. By conducting a series of well-powered, preregistered conjoint and vignette experiments in the and the UK during the height of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, we examine the extent to which citizens are willing to support policies that violate liberal democratic rights in a crisis as well as intrusive policies. Our results suggest that support for liberal democratic rights is quite robust, although endorsements by an in-group party or trusted expert can increase support for illiberal policies. Overall, we find noteworthy resistance to illiberal policy measures, such as postponing elections and banning protests, indicating popular commitment to liberal democratic norms.