Issue Ownership,Issue Positions,and Candidate Assessment

I argue that citizens alter their views of candidates’ ideological and issue positions in response to two kinds of information cues: issue ownership and issue position cues. Issue ownership cues associate a candidate with the party that owns the issue discussed by a candidate. Issue position cues associate a candidate with the party that is linked to the position that the candidate discusses. These cues can either lead citizens to view the candidate as more or less extreme—both in terms of ideological and issue position assessments—than that candidate’s party. When both types of cues are present, citizens should ignore the issue ownership cues in favor of the easier-to-process issue position cues. Evidence from a survey experiment embedded in the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study provides strong support for this theory and suggests that issue ownership can convey positional information.     

Social background and citizen–legislator congruence in candidate-centred systems

Legislatures are arenas where diverse policy preferences are honed into practical policy proposals. Given that legislative membership is a result of free democratic elections, there is an assumption that the attitudes and opinions of MPs are representative of the population as a whole. Thus, pre-legislative bargaining is founded on an unbiased sample of public opinion. However, considerable opinion incongruence exists between citizens and the political elite in many systems, potentially undermining this ideal democratic starting point for legislative business. Candidate-centred voting systems offer the potential to remedy this disconnect. While citizens tend to emphasise personal characteristics as an explanation for vote choice in one of the most candidate-centred systems in existence, proportional representation-single transferable vote, the disconnect of opinion congruence between citizens and elites persists. This paper finds that citizens’ emphasis on MPs’ personal characteristics when choosing representatives causes significant opinion congruence between citizens and elites on a demographic basis, particularly for under-represented groups such as women, younger citizens and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, but aggregate congruence is undermined by the lack of demographic diversity among MPs.     

Towards a ‘New English Regionalism’ in the North? The Case of Yorkshire First

Traditionally, the debate over English devolution has been framed by mainstream parties, favouring a top‐down approach. However, this scenario has recently started to change, particularly in the areas with stronger regional identities such as the North of England. In 2014, the first regionalist party (Yorkshire First) was created, followed by the North East Party and the Northern Party. Such actors overtly challenge the narratives of regionalisation that have prevailed so far, and endorse bottom‐up regionalism. This article offers the first analysis of these ‘new regional voices’ in the North, and seeks to assess emerging tensions between regionalisation and regionalism in the devolution debate. To achieve this, it concentrates on the case of Yorkshire First, drawing on documentary analysis and the results of a membership survey. It will be argued that, although still limited in its impact, the rise of Yorkshire First signals the presence of a political vacuum in the region which has been left open by mainstream politics, and that regional identity and territorial cleavages do matter in the current debate on devolution in the North of England.     

Consenting to Exclude? Empirical Patterns of Democracy and Immigrant Integration Policy

Studies explaining immigrant integration policies commonly focus on single aspects such as right-populist party politics or the immigration legacy of a country. This neglects the overall character of the democratic system within which policy-making unfolds. Research on empirical patterns of democracy, in turn, suggests that consensus democracies pursue ‘kinder and gentler’ policies and outperform majoritarian democracies in terms of minority representation. The article tests whether this conclusion holds for the specific group of immigrant minorities and analyses the relationship between patterns of democracy and immigrant integration policy using a new dataset on empirical democracies in 30 European and North American countries. Simultaneously estimating the character of democratic systems in terms of power dispersion and its effect on integration policies, the analysis reveals a distinct ‘Janus-faced’ pattern: while proportional power dispersion tends to coincide with more inclusive immigrant integration policies, pronounced veto structures tend to foster exclusion.     

Drivers of political parties’ voting behaviour in European economic governance: the ultimate decline of the economic cleavage?

The article examines the factors that determined the attitude of parliamentary parties towards eurozone anti-crisis measures. Using a statistical logit model, it demonstrates that, while all governing parties supported such measures, opposition parties were divided. The support of the former is explicable in terms of international obligations. The positions of opposition parties reflected their attitude towards European integration: Eurosceptic parties tended to oppose anti-crisis measures. Furthermore, whereas negative votes were less likely in countries marked by higher levels of popular trust in government and satisfaction with the problem-solving capacity of the EU, the likelihood of no votes increased as a function of the level of trust in national parliaments. The policy preferences of opposition parties, measured on the economic left–right scale, did not provide significant explanatory potential; nor did an additional test measuring the impact of extreme left?right positions.     

Union members at the polls in diverse trade union landscapes

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.     

Catalysts and barriers: Explaining electoral reform in Western Europe

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.     

How programmatic profiles of niche parties affect their electoral performance

Previous studies on the electoral performance of niche parties have not fully taken into account the evolutionary aspect of the programmatic profiles of these parties, although the majority of these parties were analysed from when they first came into existence, as new parties. Acknowledging the variation in programmatic profiles between niche parties and over time, the article argues that the electoral effects of nicheness and programmatic concentration as programmatic features of niche parties vary over their lifecycle. When entering the electoral arena, niche parties benefit from high levels of nicheness and programmatic concentration. However, these positive effects decrease as parties grow older and face different challenges to those of their early days. The empirical analysis of green and extreme right parties in this article supports the corresponding hypotheses. Results show that the positive effects of nicheness and programmatic concentration vanish over time and indicate niche parties’ own influence on their electoral destiny.     

Income inequality and election outcomes in OECD countries: New evidence following the Great Recession of 2008–2009

Using data on national parliamentary election outcomes in 32 OECD countries from 1975 to 2013, we investigate the importance of economic voting. We focus on the relevance of income inequality which has resurfaced to the forefront of public debate since the last global economic downturn. Additionally, we examine whether the degree of economic voting varies with the political orientation of the incumbent government. Finally, we check whether the Great Recession of 2008–2009 alters the degree to which voters hold the incumbent government, specifically left parties, responsible for poor economic performance and rising inequality. We find that economic growth is the most robust variable for economic voting, before and after the Great Recession. The vote share for left-leaning parties declines when income inequality rises during normal economic times. However, voters are more likely to vote for left-wing incumbents if domestic income inequality and unemployment rate rose during the Great Recession.     

Turning your back on the EU. The role of Eurosceptic parties in the 2014 European Parliament elections

This paper analyses how disaffection with the EU influenced individuals' likelihood of turning out to vote and of casting a vote for a Eurosceptic party in the 2014 EP elections, and how these relationships were moderated by the Eurosceptic partisan supply of each country. We argue that the degree to which political parties oppose European integration, as well as the ideological leaning of Eurosceptic parties, should influence both the likelihood of disaffected citizens turning out to vote, and their likelihood of voting for a Eurosceptic party. Our empirical findings show that, in the presence of a party that is strongly opposed to European integration, disaffected citizens are more likely to turn out to vote and to vote for a Eurosceptic party provided that this party also shares their ideological leaning in the left-right dimension. These results indicate that Eurosceptic parties are important actors for the politicization of the European integration conflict and for the Europeanization of EP elections, but, at the same time, they suggest that opposition to European integration is subordinate to the traditional left-right conflict.