Party competition and citizens' political attitudes in the American states

Democratic theorists argue that vigorous competition between candidates/parties is essential for democracy to flourish because it engages citizens' political interest and ultimately makes elected officials more accountable to their constituents. Using data on citizens' perceptions of government responsiveness to their political opinions from the American National Election Studies and the Ranney measure of party competition for control of state government, we examine the effects of competition on citizens' political attitudes from 1952 to 2008. Our analysis reveals that citizens feel government is more responsive to them when there is greater competition between the two parties for control of government in their state. However, this relationship is confined only to citizens who identify with the party that controls government in their state. We also find that the relationship between competition and efficacy is strongest among citizens with lower levels of education and income. These results suggest that vigorous competition for control of state government can have important implications for citizens' political attitudes.     

Corruption, Political Allegiances, and Attitudes Toward Government in Contemporary Democracies

Using surveys conducted in sixteen mature and newly established democracies around the globe, this study examines the effect of corruption on people's attitudes toward government. The analysis demonstrates that citizens in countries with higher levels of corruption express more negative evaluations of the performance of the political system and exhibit lower levels of trust in civil servants. However, the results also show that the negative effect of corruption on evaluations of the political system is significantly attenuated among supporters of the incumbent political authorities. These findings provide strong and systematic evidence that informal political practices, especially those that compromise important democratic principles, should be considered important indicators of political system performance. Moreover, they imply that, while corruption is a powerful determinant of political support across widely varying political, cultural, and economic contexts, it does not uniformly diminish support for political institutions across all segments of the electorate.     

Lokale Politik und die Sozialisation demokratischer Einstellungen in Europa

The legitimacy of European democracies is challenged by a fading away of their citizens’ support (see Putnam et al. 2000). This phenomenon of declining support might even become more severe when formerly national political competencies are moved away to supranational institutions like the European Union. In this situation the local level gains importance. Can local government be a “training-ground” for positive democratic attitudes that strengthens political support also at higher levels of government? And is local autonomy a tool to foster this support function of local politics? Using comparative survey data on local and national political attitudes in Europe as well as macro data on local autonomy these questions will be investigated. The results show a remarkable socialization function of local politics, which is especially strong concerning feelings of local political competence. However, positive effects from local autonomy that support this democratic support function of local politics are hardly to be found.     

Adapting to party lines: the effect of party affiliation on attitudes to immigration

Public opinion on immigration is increasingly relevant for political behaviour. However, little is known about the way in which citizens’ political allegiances in turn shape their attitudes to immigration. Abundant existing evidence suggests that voters often take cues from the parties they support. Using panel data from the Netherlands and Sweden, this article investigates the dynamic relation between attitudes to immigration and party preferences. The longitudinal nature of the data allows for making stronger claims about causal mechanisms than previous cross-sectional studies. The analysis shows that voters who change their preference to the Radical Right become stricter on immigration, whereas voters changing to the Greens become less strict on immigration over time. This confirms that citizens’ support for anti- and pro-immigration parties results in a ‘radicalisation’ of their views on immigration along party lines. A similar ‘spiral’ of radicalisation can be found around the issue of European integration.     

Technocratic attitudes and voting behaviour ten years after the Eurozone crisis: Evidence from the 2019 EP elections

The onset of the Great Recession raised the profile of technocracy, or government by experts, as a contrasting model to democracy. Yet, there is little research on how attitudes towards technocracy may impact European citizens' political behaviour. Moreover, the consistency of technocracy supporters' political attitudes, especially towards the EU, is questionable. This paper uses new survey panel data collected before and after the European parliament elections in May 2019 in six countries (Belgium, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain). We investigate how citizens’ technocratic attitudes affect their voting behaviour in the European elections. We find evidence that citizens with technocratic attitudes are less likely to support mainstream parties, and tend to either abstain or, if they vote, to give their vote to anti-system parties, especially from the populist right. In addition, by distinguishing technocracy supporters according to their partisanship, we conclude that technocracy is a thin ideology that can be combined with different patterns of political support: while many technocracy supporters have no party identification or support non-mainstream parties and show dissatisfaction with democracy and the EU, another subgroup of technocracy supporters identifies with a mainstream political party and show above average political support and support for the EU.     

How Do Indifferent Voters Decide? The Political Importance of Implicit Attitudes

A hallmark finding in the study of public opinion is that many citizens approach the political realm with one‐sided attitudes that color their judgments, making attitude change difficult. This finding highlights the importance of citizens with weak prior attitudes, since they might represent a segment of the electorate that is more susceptible to influence. The judgment processes of citizens with weak attitudes, however, are poorly understood. Drawing from dual‐process models in psychology, I test the idea that citizens with weak explicit attitudes rely on implicit attitudes as they render political judgments. I find support for this conjecture in experimental and observational data. There are two main contributions. First, I show that an important and understudied segment of the electorate arrives at political decisions via automatic (but nonetheless predictable) mental processes. Second, I characterize the conditions under which implicit political attitudes matter more and less.     

Public support for state surveillance

This study examines citizens’ support for state surveillance, contingent upon factors related to policy design and the context of implementation. While most people want to live in a secure environment, we argue in this study that the support of policies to reach this goal depends on their necessity, extensiveness and reliability. Results from survey experiments in four European countries show that citizens are ready to approve the introduction of far-reaching state surveillance that includes measures of facial recognition and motion detection. Public support is further enhanced if these measures are to be targeted at potential criminals, rather than at all citizens (i.e., policy extensiveness), as well as if a safety threat is salient (i.e., policy necessity). Concerns about data security reduce support (i.e., policy reliability). While these conditions matter for the support of specific policies, they do not influence how trustworthy citizens consider government and other political authorities to be.     

Does political trust matter? An empirical investigation into the relation between political trust and support for law compliance

Scholars have repeatedly expressed concern about the consequences low levels of political trust might have for the stability of democratic political systems. Empirical support and the identification of causal mechanisms for this concern, however, are often lacking. In this article, the relation between political trust and law‐abiding attitudes is investigated. It is expected that citizens with low levels of trust in the institutions of the political system will find it more acceptable to break the law. As a result, low levels of political trust might undermine the effectiveness and legitimacy of government action and its ability to implement legislation. Based on survey data from 33 European countries using the 1999–2001 European Values Study (N = 41,125), the relation between political trust and legal permissiveness is examined using a multilevel ordered logistic regression analysis. The results show that respondents with low levels of political trust are significantly more likely to accept illegal behaviour such as tax fraud than respondents with high levels of political trust. Since it is known from earlier research that actors who are permissive towards law‐breaking behaviour are more likely to commit these acts themselves, the hypothesis that low levels of political trust will be associated with less law compliance within a society is supported.     

The conditional impact of winner/loser status and ideological proximity on citizen participation

Many scholars have investigated the relationship between ideological orientations and mass participation, and there is also a growing number of studies comparing political attitudes and behaviour between electoral winners and losers. This article seeks to bring together these two strands of literature with respect to political participation, focusing on the interaction between citizens’ winner/loser status and ideological distance from their government. Analysis of data from 34 countries highlights the importance of this interactive effect: while previous works suggest that losers have a greater propensity to take part in political activities, it is shown here that this relationship holds true only when losers occupy a position along the left‐right spectrum distant from the government. Furthermore, while the hypothesised interactive effect is empirically confirmed for turnout, the magnitude of its impact is much greater for more costly modes of participation such as contacting, campaigning and protesting     

Who cares about the public sphere?

This article offers the first empirical and cross-national analysis of citizens’ views about the democratic importance of the public sphere. We first identify three normative functions that public spheres are expected to perform in representative democracies: they provide voice to alternative perspectives, they empower citizens to criticise political authorities and they disseminate information on matters of public interest. We then argue that citizens develop differentiated views about the importance of these democratic functions, depending on (1) their ability to influence political decisions through public debate, and (2) the extent to which voice, critique and information address democratic problems they particularly care about. Drawing on Wave 6 of the European Social Survey, the statistical analysis indicates that citizens in most European countries consider the public sphere very important for democracy, especially its role as a supplier of reliable information. However, certain groups tend to care more about different aspects of the public sphere. More educated citizens are more likely to assign greater importance to all three functions. Members of cultural and sexual minorities are more likely to emphasise the importance of giving voice to alternative perspectives, while citizens dissatisfied with the government are more likely to prioritise public criticism and access to reliable information. Finally, in countries with more democratic public spheres, differences based on education and minority status are wider, while differences based on government satisfaction disappear. These findings support the claim that citizens care more about the public sphere when they can effectively influence political decision making through public debate or when the public sphere addresses democratic problems that are especially important to them. Moreover, our results indicate that citizens see some of the functions that public spheres perform as core aspects of democracy, comparable in importance to free and fair elections and the rule of law. The article thus advances an empirically grounded defence of the centrality of public debate for democracy.     

Civil Society Making Political Claims: Outcries,Interest Advocacy,and Deliberative Claims

Increased citizen participation is proposed to remedy democratic deficits. However, it is unclear whether such participation improves reason‐based discussions or whether it serves mainly as a safety valve for discontented citizens. To what extent does citizen‐initiated participation involve reason‐based arguments? This study examines citizens’ reason giving based on unique data on citizens’ contacts with local authorities in Sweden. It provides support for proponents of deliberative participation, as an unexpected amount of contacts provided reasons for clearly stated positions and invitations to a constructive dialogue with authorities. There is variation across issues. More conflictual issues involve fewer intentions to participate in a reasoned exchange of arguments. The study shows that citizens deliver more reason‐based input to democratic decision making when they prepare their position in groups than when they participate as individuals. Findings are preliminary but clearly illustrate the fruitfulness of widening the research agenda on civic engagement in politics and public administration.     

Outspoken Insiders: Political Connections and Citizen Participation in Authoritarian China

Few political systems are completely closed to citizen participation, but in nondemocratic systems and developing democracies, such participation may come with risks. In these contexts where fear and uncertainty may be high, why do some citizens still take action and make complaints to authorities? The resource mobilization model identifies the importance of time, money, and civic skills as resources that are necessary for participation. In this paper, we build on this model and argue that political connections—close personal ties to someone working in government—can also constitute a critical resource, especially in contexts with weak democratic institutions. Using data from both urban and rural China, we find that individuals with political connections are more likely to contact authorities with complaints about government public services, despite the fact that they do not have higher levels of dissatisfaction with public service provision. We conduct various robustness checks, including a sensitivity analysis, and show that this relationship is unlikely to be driven by an incorrect model specification or unobserved confounding variables.     

Public Attitudes Toward Social Spending in the United States: The Differences Between Direct Spending and Tax Expenditures

This paper uses a survey experiment to examine differences in public attitudes toward ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ government spending. Federal social welfare spending in the USA has two components: the federal government spends money to directly provide social benefits to citizens, and also indirectly subsidizes the private provision of social benefits through tax expenditures. Though benefits provided through tax expenditures are considered spending for budgetary purposes, they differ from direct spending in several ways: in the mechanisms through which benefits are delivered to citizens, in how they distribute wealth across the income spectrum, and in the visibility of their policy consequences to the mass public. We develop and test a model explaining how these differences will affect public attitudes toward spending conducted through direct and indirect means. We find that support for otherwise identical social programs is generally higher when such programs are portrayed as being delivered through tax expenditures than when they are portrayed as being delivered by direct spending. In addition, support for tax expenditure programs which redistribute wealth upward drops when citizens are provided information about the redistributive effects. Both of these results are conditioned by partisanship, with the opinions of Republicans more sensitive to the mechanism through which benefits are delivered, and the opinions of Democrats more sensitive to information about their redistributive effects.     

Social and Political Consequences of Administrative Corruption: A Study of Public Perceptions in Spain

Spain experienced an outbreak of public sector corruption—much of it related to the involvement of regional and local administrators and politicians in the country's urban development boom—that angered the public and sparked calls for government reform. Using data from a 2009 survey that followed these events, the authors examine the association between perceived corruption and the attitudes and behaviors of citizens, including satisfaction with government and democracy, social and institutional trust, and rule‐breaking behaviors. The findings suggest that perceptions of administrative as well as political corruption are associated with less satisfaction, lower levels of social and institutional trust, and a greater willingness to break rules. Although these survey results cannot prove causation, they are consistent with the notion that administrative and political corruption damages the legitimacy of government in the eyes of citizens and weakens the social fabric of democratic society.     

Democracy and Deceit: Regulating Appearances of Corruption

While corruption has long been recognized as an appropriate object of regulation, concern with appearances of corruption is of recent origin, coinciding with declining trust in government in the mid- to late-1960s. The reasoning that would support regulations of appearances, however, remains flawed, as it depends upon a "public trust" model of public service that is incomplete and often misplaced when applied to political representatives. The justification for regulating appearances is unambiguous, however, from the perspective of democratic theory. Democratic institutions of representation depend upon the integrity of appearances, not simply because they are an indication of whether political representatives are upholding their public trust, but because they provide the means through which citizens can judge whether, in particular instances, their trust is warranted. Representatives, institutions, and ethics that fail to support public confidence in appearances disempower citizens by denying them the means for inclusion in public judgments. These failures amount to a corruption of democratic processes.     

Multidimensional government‐citizen congruence and satisfaction with democracy

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.     

Why are highly informed citizens sceptical of referenda?

Past work on attitudes toward the use of referenda finds that the most politically informed citizens are more sceptical of its use than their less informed counterparts. An intriguing tension presents itself in that those citizens who may be best equipped for referendum voting, the highly informed and politically sophisticated, are the least likely to support the use of this tool of direct democracy. Using data from Canadian Election Studies, we consider three explanations for relative referenda scepticism among political sophisticates. Our analyses provide evidence to support a confidence in government explanation and a concern for minority rights explanation, but not an incompetent public explanation – a curious finding considering the centrality of citizen competence in the theoretical literature on referenda.     

A problem-based approach to understanding public support for referendums

A prominent explanation of widespread popular support for referendums is dissatisfaction with the functioning of representative democracy. In this article, the aim is to gain a better understanding of how dissatisfaction affects support for referendums. Drawing on previous research, it is argued here that citizens follow a problem-based approach in their support for referendums, in that referendums are considered a suitable solution to address some specific problems in a political system but not all. Survey data from the 2012 European Social Survey (29 countries; N = 37,070) is used to show that citizens’ expectations towards and evaluations of representatives relate to support for referendums. In particular, dissatisfaction with the ability of governments to listen to their citizens is associated with higher support for referendums. In contrast, citizens dissatisfied with the government's ability to lead are less supportive of referendums. Furthermore, the relationship between dissatisfaction with governments’ ability to listen varies across countries depending on the level of experience with decision making via referendum. In countries where referendums are used more often, the expectation of referendums being able to solve the problem of unresponsive government is weaker. This study offers important insights into the different ways in which preferences and evaluations of representative practices relate to popular support for referendums.     

Do opportunistic snap elections affect political trust? Evidence from a natural experiment

Snap elections, those triggered by incumbents in advance of their original date in the electoral calendar, are a common feature of parliamentary democracies. In this paper, I ask: do snap elections influence citizens’ trust in the government? Theoretically, I argue that providing citizens with an additional means of endorsing or rejecting the incumbent – giving voters a chance to ‘have their say’ – can be interpreted by citizens as normatively desirable and demonstrative of the incumbent's desire to legitimise their agenda by (re)-invigorating their political mandate. Leveraging the quasi-experimental setting provided by the coincidental timing of the UK Prime Minister, Theresa May's, shock announcement of early elections in April 2017 with the fieldwork for the Eurobarometer survey, I demonstrate that the announcement of snap elections had a sizeable and significant positive effect on political trust. This trust-inducing effect is at odds with the observed electoral consequences of the 2017 snap elections. Whilst incumbent-triggered elections can facilitate net gains for the sitting government, May's 2017 gamble cost the Conservative Party their majority. Snap elections did increase political trust. These trust-inducing effects were not observed symmetrically for all citizens. Whilst Eurosceptics and voters on the right of the ideological spectrum – those most inclined to support the incumbent May-led Conservative government in 2017 – became more trusting, no such changes in trust were observed amongst left-wing or non-Eurosceptic respondents. This study advances the understanding of a relatively understudied yet not uncommon political phenomenon, providing causal evidence that snap elections have implications for political trust.     

An Insider–Outsider Theory of Popular Tolerance for Corrupt Politicians

This article addresses the puzzle of electoral support for corrupt politicians in emerging democracies by examining citizens’ varying attitudes toward political corruption. We make an important theoretical distinction between perceptions of and tolerance for corruption, and argue that these different attitudes vary across individuals depending on whether they are political insiders or outsiders. We test our theory using Afrobarometer survey data from 18 sub‐Saharan African countries and find that individuals included within clientelistic networks simultaneously perceive corruption as ubiquitous and are more tolerant of malfeasance. Meanwhile, those individuals with partisan or ethnic ties to the incumbent are less likely to consider corruption as widespread. Finally, we explore whether variation in attitudes toward corruption influences citizens’ voting behavior, and find that insiders are less likely to “vote the rascals out.”