Abstract Research shows that voters use coalition decisions as a heuristic to infer party positions, but little work has studied whether coalition decisions have long-term effects. I argue that voters have longer-lasting impressions of coalition relationships that affect their perceptions of parties after any given coalition ends. Voters keep a running tally of which parties have governed together and update their perceptions of current coalitions based on these prior expectations. Using data from ParlGov and CSES, I analyze coalition relationships across European countries to model the inter-dependencies between party dyads. The results of this analysis show that voters view parties that have previously coalesced as closer together when neither party is in government, as long as they do not change partners, and voters have the strongest reactions to unprecedented and exclusive coalition partnerships.

Abstract Previous research has shown that economic sanctions affect public opinion in targeted countries, either by rallying the public around the incumbent government or turning them against the sanctioning actors. This study explores the effects of economic sanctions on popular political orientations, with a particular focus on democratic sanctions. We argue that, in response to external coercion in the name of democracy, the public is motivated to defend their own country, thereby triggering a backlash against democracy. Based on evidence from Arab states (2010–2019) and using instrumental variable estimation to address the endogeneity, our research reveals that democratic sanctions can trigger anti-democratic attitudes in targeted countries. Furthermore, the backlash effects intensify with the escalation of patriotic indoctrination, confirming that foreign pressure interacts with a state’s indoctrination potential in influencing public political orientations.

Abstract Affective polarization has become a central concept to explain how citizens think and behave in Western democracies. However, while research has made great progress studying the causes, consequences, and remedies of this concept, we know surprisingly little about how affective polarization actually feels. This research note contributes to recent efforts to characterize affective polarization with specific emotions. Drawing on cross-sectional data from five European countries (Denmark, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom; total N = 4,794), we analyze which emotions respondents report to experience toward in-party and out-party voters and which of these emotions correlate with affective polarization scores. While we find that only a few respondents report negative emotions toward in-party voters, they feel moderate amounts of hope, enthusiasm, and pride without being exuberant. Fear-related emotions toward out-party voters are rare, and while one in five respondents experiences extreme anger, disappointment, or disgust toward opponents, up to 50% experience these emotions just slightly or not at all. The emotions most consistently related to affective polarization are positive emotions toward in-party voters and – to a lesser extent – aversion, hate, and disgust toward opponents. We describe patterns across countries and demographic backgrounds and highlight a practical implication: affective polarization feels more positive than what prevailing notions of ‘fear and loathing’ let believe.

Abstract The European Council regularly intervenes in everyday law-making by expressing legislative priorities in summit conclusions. We theorise and analyse the impact of these priorities on the duration of the EU’s co-decision (or ordinary legislative) procedure. Theoretically, we argue that the European Council increases speed through leadership. Leadership translates, via political authority, into limited hierarchical relations between the national heads of state or government on the one hand and the co-legislators on the other. Drawing on scholarship on institutionalisation, crisis politics, and multi-level negotiation, we hypothesise that the European Council’s priorities can speed up co-legislation. ‘Speeding up’ should happen, in particular, from late 2009 onwards, when the European Council became a formal EU institution and in crisis-related laws, when leaders leverage their EU-level authority. We assess our argument by using a mixed-methods design. Our new dataset combines concluded legislation and pending proposals between 1999 and 2024 with the European Council’s legislative priorities. Event history analysis is bolstered with qualitative document analysis and semi-structured elite interviews. We find that leaders speed up law-making, but primarily early on in co-legislation, with a particularly pronounced effect since late 2009. Against our expectation, the European Council’s priorities do not accelerate legislation under crisis, but crisis-related laws themselves are concluded faster. Our paper provides new insights into how the European Council impacts everyday law-making and on the widely debated topic of leadership in the EU and in other multi-level systems.

Abstract How do women in parliament shape trade in clean and dirty products? A large body of literature finds that women have stronger preferences for environmental protection than men. I argue that when more women enter parliament, international trade becomes cleaner. One mechanism is by introducing more stringent environmental regulation, which shapes firms’ costs and hence comparative (dis)advantages: Stringent environmental regulation increases costs relatively more for firms producing dirty products, resulting in a comparative disadvantage in global product markets; firms producing clean products gain a comparative advantage. As a consequence, women in parliament make trade cleaner, which has consequences for environmental and distributional outcomes. Leveraging ‘gender quota shocks’ and a variety of country, firm, and product data from European Union (EU) countries, I find support for these arguments. Moreover, examining import flows, I interestingly find no evidence that gender quotas lead to the outsourcing of dirty production. I finally provide suggestive evidence for the mechanism that women’s descriptive representation shapes trade in clean versus dirty products via stricter environmental regulation. These findings enhance the study on the connection between descriptive and substantive representation, introduce a new perspective on trade and environmental politics, and highlight the significance of gendered representation for environmental and distributional outcomes.

Abstract The responsiveness of political parties to voters’ policy preferences is a core feature of democracies. A growing number of studies analyze this phenomenon, but key obstacles remain, such as the availability of reliable measures and the infrequency of these measures (election periods). As a consequence, the literature remains vague in theorizing and analyzing instances where the preferences of the median voter clash with those of the party electorate. By studying party responsiveness in a different setting, this paper advances the literature on these fronts: we focus on the Swiss political context, where the frequent use of direct democratic institutions enables us to evaluate the dynamic responsiveness of political parties with several observations per year for a large variety of topics. The paper uses a Bayesian item response theory model to operationalize the general ideological position of ballot proposals and uses them to evaluate parties’ responsiveness to the median voter and party voter. Our results confirm the most recent literature that political parties are responsive to their own electorates’ position shift but not the median voter. Furthermore, we show that, in situations where the signal from the general electorate and the party voters disagree, parties value the party voter more, thus giving even more weight to their partisan electorate. These findings have important implications for the study of party responsiveness.

Abstract Multiparty coalitions often delegate policymaking tasks to specific ministers while excluding others. This creates a delegation problem where ministers may pursue party instead of coalition goals. While such ministerial drift is well-studied in domestic policymaking, understanding in international negotiations is lacking. This paper examines when sidelined coalition parties employ public dissent as a strategy in international negotiations. I argue that dissent makes disagreement visible and can therefore constrain the compatriot minister. Using a formal model, I derive empirical implications for when outsiders should dissent according to this logic. For sidelined parties, this strategy is particularly attractive when they align more with other negotiators and lack institutional means to enforce coalition compromises. Focusing on the European Union, an empirical analysis of public dissent in parliamentary roll call votes (2004–2019) aligns well with the predictions of the formal model. This broadens our understanding of coalition policymaking in international settings.

Abstract In many countries, trust in institutions has eroded, undermining civic engagement, social cohesion, and political stability. This study analyzes the determinants of trust in government, civil servants, the judicial system, and the police, drawing on representative samples from six OECD countries (Germany, Italy, Japan, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) between 2017 and early 2020. It employs survey data, experimental methods, and psychometric techniques to measure various dimensions of trust. The findings indicate that self-reported trust in institutions hinges primarily on perceived governance quality, encompassing both competence (responsiveness, effectiveness, and reliability) and integrity (values and ethical conduct). Specifically, perceived government reliability in the event of a natural disaster and the integrity of high-level officials emerge as the strongest predictors of self-reported trust in government, followed by satisfaction with security and education services. Although partisan affiliation also exerts some influence, its effect is comparatively modest. Overall, these results suggest that trust in institutions is amenable to policy interventions that enhance governance performance, thereby fostering higher levels of public trust through repeated, positive interactions with well-functioning public services.

Abstract Populism has become generally equated with far-right politics in public discourse. Beyond this association being widely problematised in much of the literature on populism, in this theoretical intervention, we argue that the populist label is ill-fitting for far-right politics for three reasons. First, any antagonism of ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’ is only secondary, at best, for the far right. Second, while populism constructs an anti-elitist crisis of the system, the far right constructs a crisis in the system, seeking to (re-)entrench elite rule and systems of oppression. Third, populism transgresses hegemonic political norms by making a novel political subject visible, whereas the far right attempts to extend the privilege of its already privileged voting base. As such, we argue that we should abandon the ‘populist’ signifier to refer to reactionary politics and instead rely on more precise, but also more stigmatising signifiers such as far/radical/extreme right for projects of reactionary people-building. Whereas populism builds a coalition through equivalential links between the demands of ‘the people’, such demands are of little concern for reactionary elites. Instead, ‘the people’ are constructed to lend legitimacy to their elitist project. While there are clear risks in attempting to reclaim the concept considering its quasi-hegemonic misuse, we argue that the emancipatory potential of populism makes it worthy of serious investigation in our demophobic and authoritarian times.

Abstract Recent literature suggests that citizens in Western democracies have become desensitized to Islamist terrorism and that Islamist attacks therefore no longer evoke the same changes in political attitudes as before. However, this hypothesis remains undertheorized and has not been systematically tested. We develop a theoretical framework that positions desensitization alongside alternative trajectories of public responsiveness and subject it to two complementary tests. In Study 1, we draw on a meta-analytic dataset of over 170 previous studies and 800 effect estimates to assess whether public reactions to Islamist terrorism have changed as a result of repeated exposure. In Study 2, we conduct a more controlled comparison of the effects of two recent Islamist terrorist attacks using a comparable research design and a new data source. Across both studies, we find little evidence that responsiveness has systemically diminished – or increased – over time, calling into question the presumed erosion of the effects of Islamist terrorism on political attitudes in Western democracies.