The electoral consequences of the Great Recession are analysed in this article by combining insights from economic voting theories and the literature on party system change. Taking cues from these two theoretical perspectives, the impact of the Great Recession on the stability and change of Western, Central and Eastern European party systems is assessed. The article starts from the premise that, in order to fully assess the impact of the contemporary crisis, classic economic voting hypotheses focused on incumbent parties need to be combined with accounts of long‐term party system change provided by realignment and dealignment theories. The empirical analysis draws on an original dataset of election results and economic and political indicators in 30 European democracies. The results indicate that during the Great Recession economic strain was associated with sizable losses for incumbent parties and an increasing destabilisation of Western European party systems, while its impact was significantly weaker in Central and Eastern European countries, where political rather than economic failures appeared to be more relevant. In line with the realignment perspective, the results also reveal that in Western Europe populist radical right, radical left and non‐mainstream parties benefited the most from the economic hardship, while support for mainstream parties decreased further.

A major programme of research on cognition has been built around the idea that human beings are frequently intuitive thinkers and that human intuition is imperfect. The modern marketing of politics and the time‐poor position of many citizens suggests that ‘fast’, intuitive, thinking in many contemporary democracies is ubiquitous. This article explores the consequences that such fast thinking might have for the democratic practice of contemporary politics. Using focus groups with a range of demographic profiles, fast thinking about how politics works is stimulated and followed by a more reflective and collectively deliberative form of slow thinking among the same participants. A strong trajectory emerges consistently in all groups in that in fast thinking mode participants are noticeably more negative and dismissive about the workings of politics than when in slow thinking mode. A fast thinking focus among citizens may be good enough to underwrite mainstream political exchange, but at the cost of supporting a general negativity about politics and the way it works. Yet breaking the cycle of fast thinking – as advocated by deliberation theorists – might not be straightforward because of the grip of fast thinking. The fast/slow thinking distinction, if carefully used, offers valuable new insight into political science.

Parties’ parliamentary delegations contain a multitude of interests. While scholars suspect that this variation affects party behaviour, most work on parties’ policy statements treats parties as unitary actors. This reflects the absence of strong expectations concerning when (and how) the parliamentary caucus matters for platform construction, as well as the difficulties inherent in testing such claims. Drawing on the literature on women's descriptive representation, this article argues that the makeup of the parliamentary party likely has important consequences for issue entrepreneurship, the scope of issues represented on the manifesto and even the left‐right position of election platforms. With the most comprehensive party‐level study of women's representation ever conducted, three diversity hypotheses are tested using data on the gender makeup of parties’ parliamentary delegations and the content of their manifestos for 110 parties in 20 democracies between 1952 and 2011. The analyses show that as the percentage of women in the parliamentary party increases, parties address a greater diversity of issues in their election campaigns. Women's presence is also associated with more left‐leaning manifestos, even when controlling for parties’ prior ideological positions. Together, these findings illustrate a previously overlooked consequence of descriptive representation and provide a framework for understanding when and why the parliamentary party influences manifesto formation. They show that diversity – or lack thereof – has important consequences for parties’ policy statements, and thus the overall quality of representation.

The economic crisis that started in 2008 has negatively affected European nations to different degrees. The sudden rise in demonstrations particularly in those countries most hard hit by the crisis suggests that grievance theories, dismissed in favour of resource‐based models since the 1970s, might have a role to play in explaining protest behaviour. While most previous studies have tested these theories at the individual or contextual levels, it is likely that mechanisms at both levels are interrelated. To fill this lacuna, this article examines the ways in which individual‐level grievances interact with macro‐level factors to impact on protest behaviour. In particular, it examines whether the impact of individual subjective feelings of deprivation is conditional on contextual macroeconomic and policy factors. It is found that while individual‐level relative deprivation has a direct effect on the propensity to have protested in the last year, this effect is greater under certain macroeconomic and political conditions. Both significant results for the cross‐level interactions are interpreted in terms of their role for opening up political opportunities for protest among those who feel they have been most deprived in the current crisis. These findings suggest that the interaction of the contextual and individual levels should continue to be explored in future studies in order to further clarify the mechanisms underlying protest behaviour.

Some scholars and policy makers argue in favour of increasing democratic contestation for leadership and policy at the European level, for instance by having European‐wide parties campaign for competing candidates for President of the European Commission ahead of European Parliament elections. But do such changes put the survival of the European Union at risk? According to the consociational interpretation of the EU, the near absence of competitive and majoritarian elements has been a necessary condition for the stability of the EU political system given its highly diverse population. This article contributes to the debate in two ways. First, it develops a more precise understanding of ‘problematic’ diversity by examining how three variables – the heterogeneity, polarisation and crosscuttingness of citizen preferences over public polices – affect the risk of democratic contestation generating persistent and systematically dissatisfied minorities. Second, it uses opinion surveys to determine whether the degree of diversity of the European population is problematically high compared to that of established democratic states. It is found that the population of the EU is slightly more heterogeneous and polarised than the population of the average Member State, although policy preferences in several Member States are more heterogeneous and polarised than the EU as a whole. Strikingly, however, policy preference cleavages are more crosscutting in the EU than in nearly all Member States, reducing the risk of persistent minorities. Moreover, policy preferences tend to be less heterogeneous and polarised, and nearly as crosscutting, in the EU as a whole as in the United States. For observers worried about how high polarisation and low crosscuttingness in policy preferences may combine to threaten democratic stability, these findings should be reassuring.

Arend Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy, similar to most of his work, elicited fierce scientific debate. This article replicates some of the analyses proposed in its second edition (published in 2012) in the light of the critiques received by the first edition (published in 2009). It primarily examines the relationship between institutional setup and interest group representation, disentangling the effect of consensualism from that of corporatism on issues such as macroeconomic performance and governance capabilities. The article further deepens our understanding of the complex causal mechanisms connecting these variables, proposing a more sophisticated empirical investigation that emphasises selection effects and conjunctural causation.

Legislative checks give whoever wields them influence over policy making. It is argued in this article that this influence implies the ability not only to affect legislative content, but also to direct public resources toward private ends. Rational politicians should use access to checks to make themselves better off – for example, by biasing policy toward private interests or creating opportunities to draw directly from the public till. Disincentives exist only to the extent that those able to observe or block corruption do not themselves benefit from it. Political opponents thus can use checks to stymie each other, but legislative checks controlled by political allies create conditions for collusion and corruption. Testing this claim against data from a sample of 84 countries, the results presented in this article show strong support for the hypothesised relationship between institutional checks and corruption.

Most accounts of electoral system change tend to consider it as being driven by purely partisan interests. Political parties are expected to change the electoral rules as a way to maximise gains or minimise losses. However, little work has been done on the question of why electoral reforms are so scarce in spite of these potential benefits. In this study, a wide range of both factors that may foster (‘catalysts’) and ones that may hinder (‘barriers’) the change of electoral institutions are investigated. A statistical analysis is performed of 16 West European countries from 1975 to 2005, covering 23 reforms of the proportionality of their electoral systems. It is found that procedural barriers are more effective for explaining the likelihood of electoral reforms than (most of) the catalysts. Additionally, there are indications that courts may play a more active role in triggering reform than previously thought.

This article investigates to what extent social democratic parties still benefit from the support of union members at the polls. Not only are social democratic parties confronted with new competitors in the party systems, but also the union confederations of the socialist labour movement are in some countries losing their dominant position due to the rise of separate professional confederations. It is argued in the article that the effect of union membership on voting choice is conditioned by the structure of the trade union movement. The support of union members for social democracy is fostered by the strength of the confederations historically close to this party family, while it is hampered when strong separate (or politically unaffiliated) white‐collar confederations exist. Using European Social Survey and Swedish Public Opinion data, the article shows that social democratic parties still enjoy important support from trade union members, but at the same time are under fierce competition from bourgeois and green parties among members of white‐collar confederations. This reinforces the challenges for social democracy to build new voters’ coalitions in post‐industrial societies.

The 2008/2009 economic crisis has been identified as an important element contributing to declining trust in institutions in Europe and worldwide. However, it is unclear whether this decline in trust is distributed homogenously among citizens or whether there are differences across social strata. This article applies multilevel models to six waves of European Social Survey (ESS) data to analyse changes in trust in the European Parliament (EP) from 2002 to 2012 in 20 European Union countries. Moreover, it investigates whether individuals with different socioeconomic backgrounds experienced different reductions in trust. The results indicate that trust in the EP declined the most in the peripheral European countries hit hardest by the economic crisis: Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Cyprus, Greece and Spain. Furthermore, the results suggest that the decline in trust was more pronounced among subjects with lower social status. The tightening of the link between social and political inequalities is especially preoccupying considering the importance of trust in institutions for citizens to actively participate in society, voice their needs and demand their place at the table. Hence, the worsening economic conditions, combined with declining levels of trust, are not only troublesome for the functioning of democracies as a whole, but they are also problematic at the individual level as they are likely to perpetuate the divide among subjects at different ends of the social ladder.

What effect do pro‐market economic policies have on labour rights? Despite significant debate in policy and academic circles about the consequences of economic liberalisation, little is known about the labour rights effects of pro‐market policies. Extant literature has focused only on the possible outcomes of market‐liberalising policies, such as trade and investment flows, rather than directly assessing market‐friendly policies and institutions. Moreover, this line of research has found mixed results on how these outcomes influence labour conditions. To provide a comprehensive assessment of this linkage, this article combines data on five distinct policy areas associated with economic liberalisation with data on labour rights for the period 1981–2012. The results indicate that pro‐market policies – except the ones involving rule of law and secure property rights – undermine labour rights. Thus while there are some positive economic and political outcomes associated with market‐supporting policies, economic liberalisation comes at the cost of respect for labour rights.

A significant shortcoming in contemporary deliberative systems is that citizens are disconnected from various elite sites of public deliberation. This article explores the concept of ‘coupling’ as a means to better link citizens and elites in deliberative systems. The notion of ‘designed coupling’ is developed to describe institutional mechanisms for linking otherwise disconnected deliberative sites. To consider whether it is possible and indeed desirable to use institutional design to couple different sites in a deliberative system, the article draws on insights from a case study in which a mini‐public was formally integrated into a legislative committee. The empirical study finds that it is not only feasible to couple mini‐publics to legislative committees, but when combined, the democratic and deliberative capacity of both institutions can be strengthened. To be effective, ‘designed coupling’ requires more than establishing institutional connections; it also requires that actors to step outside their comfort zone to build new relationships and engage in new communicative spaces with different sets of ideas, actors and rules. This can be facilitated by institutional design, but it also requires leaders and champions who are well‐placed to encourage actors to think differently.

Few political parties are willing to lead the public debate on how the European Union should develop and parties rarely publicly discuss issues on the EU agenda. This is probably one of the most important democratic problems in the contemporary EU. When and why parties are willing (or not willing) to discuss European cooperation is therefore an essential issue in which political science should engage. Previous research has shown that parties that are internally divided on EU issues downplay these issues in order to avoid internal disputes. At the same time, parties that have severe intraparty conflicts over the issue are unable to contain the debate. Thus, parties that are unified in their position on EU issues and parties that are heavily split speak about the EU, but others do not. Also, earlier research has shown that political parties downplay issues in response to internal divisions among their supporters. It is argued in this article that the focus should not be solely on intraparty conflict or whether or not a party's voters are hesitant or disunited, but rather on how these factors interact in order to better understand how parties act strategically regarding EU issues. Using a new dataset that relies on quantitative content analysis of quality newspapers during the national election campaigns in the period 1983–2010 in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Sweden, it is found that parties that have a high degree of internal dissent on European issues, while at the same time having an equally divided electorate, are the parties that are most present in the public debate. Hence, it is the interaction between these two important factors that explains much of the variation in the amount of attention paid to European issues in national election campaigns.

In the first comparative study of multidimensional government‐citizen policy congruence, this article shows that citizens are less satisfied with democracy when their views differ from that of the government on policy dimensions beyond the general left‐right axis. Satisfaction is reduced by a government that deviates on European integration and redistribution and partly also on social lifestyle, immigration and environmental protection. Furthermore, this analysis identifies the level of political interest as central moderator of this relationship. Satisfaction of citizens with stronger interest in politics suffers more when there is a politically distant government. Combining data from the 2010 Chapel Hill Expert Survey and two waves of the European Social Survey, the analysis builds on information on citizen‐government policy congruence of some 45,000 citizens and 31 governments in 15 Western and Central Eastern European countries. The article brings a multidimensional perspective to the study of policy congruence between citizens and governments in a time when the preference structure of parties and citizens has become increasingly complex.

As semi‐presidentialism has become increasingly common in European democracies, so have the debates about the consequences of several of its political and institutional features. In particular, in those regimes, cohabitation between presidents and cabinets of different parties and cabinet dismissal powers on the part of presidents are thought to be a source of inter‐branch conflict and government instability. However, so far, most empirical work on government survival has failed to confirm any of these expectations. This article addresses this disjuncture between theory and empirical results by making a twofold contribution. First, it takes into account the internal diversity within semi‐presidentialism, modeling the implications for government survival of different configurations between presidential powers’ of cabinet dismissal, parliament dissolution and cohabitation in European semi‐presidential systems. Second, it reconsiders traditional government survival using the competing risks framework by adding a distinction between two different types of non‐electoral replacement: those where replacements imply a change in the party of the prime minister and those where they do not. Once such an approach is adopted, that presidential powers of parliamentary dissolution and cabinet dismissal indeed emerge as highly relevant for explaining government survival in these regimes.

Past work suggests that support for welfare in the United States is heavily influenced by citizens' racial attitudes. Indeed, the idea that many Americans think of welfare recipients as poor Blacks (and especially as poor Black women) has been a common explanation for Americans’ lukewarm support for redistribution. This article draws on a new online survey experiment conducted with national samples in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, designed to extend research on how racialised portrayals of policy beneficiaries affect attitudes toward redistribution. A series of innovative survey vignettes has been designed that experimentally manipulate the ethno‐racial background of beneficiaries for various redistributive programmes. The findings provide, for the first time, cross‐national, cross‐domain and cross‐ethno‐racial extensions of the American literature on the impact of racial cues on support for redistributive policy. The results also demonstrate that race clearly matters for policy support, although its impact varies by context and by the racial group under consideration.

The article investigates the consequences of post‐Cold War regime transitions on human development in the former Soviet bloc. Relying on a mixed‐methods research strategy that combines econometric and qualitative comparative analysis, it proceeds through three consecutive steps. First, there is a discussion of how democratic institutions may solicit governments’ attention toward social issues. Second, the relationship between democratisation and human development in 21 post‐communist countries is tested. Third, democracy in its core attributes is unpacked, and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) is used to identify a few alternative institutional configurations favouring human development. The analysis reveals that not only full democracies, but also some hybrid regimes, have been successful in this task.

In many political systems legislators face a fundamental trade‐off between allocating effort to constituency service and to national policy‐making activities, respectively. How do voters want their elected representatives to solve this trade‐off? This article provides new insights into this question by developing a conjoint analysis approach to estimating voters’ preferences over their legislator's effort allocation. This approach is applied in Britain, where it is found that effort allocation has a significant effect on voter evaluations of legislators, even in a political system where other legislator attributes – in particular, party affiliation – might be expected to predominate. This effect is nonlinear, with voters generally preferring a moderate balance of constituency and national policy work. Preferences over legislator effort allocation are not well‐explained by self‐interest or more broadly by instrumental considerations. They are, however, associated with voters’ local‐cosmopolitan orientation, suggesting that heuristic reasoning based on underlying social dispositions may be more important in determining preferences over representative activities.

Becoming a parent can affect the lives of men and women by introducing salient new social roles and identities, altered social networks and tighter constraints on financial resources and time. Even though modern family life has evolved in many important respects, parenthood continues to shape the lives of men and women in very different ways. Given that parenthood can change the lives of men and women in profoundly different ways, it seems that it would bring about changes in the way women and men think about politics and policy issues. Using data from the Wave 4 of the European Social Survey, this article investigates how parenthood, and the distinctions of motherhood and fatherhood, influence attitudes. The findings suggest that parenthood can have a polarising effect on attitudes, and that the polarising effect is most evident in countries where there is less support from the state for parental responsibilities.

A growing body of work has examined the relationship between media and politics from an agenda‐setting perspective: Is attention for issues initiated by political elites with the media following suit, or is the reverse relation stronger? A long series of single‐country studies has suggested a number of general agenda‐setting patterns but these have never been confirmed in a comparative approach. In a comparative, longitudinal design including comparable media and politics evidence for seven European countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), this study highlights a number of generic patterns. Additionally, it shows how the political system matters. Overall, the media are a stronger inspirer of political action in countries with single‐party governments compared to those with multiple‐party governments for opposition parties. But, government parties are more reactive to media under multiparty governments.