What drives the polarisation and moderation of opinions? Evidence from a Finnish citizen deliberation experiment on immigration

In the study of deliberation, a largely under‐explored area is why some participants polarise their opinion after deliberation and why others moderate them. Opinion polarisation is usually considered a suspicious outcome of deliberation, while moderation is seen as a desirable one. This article takes issue with this view. Results from a Finnish deliberative experiment on immigration show that polarisers and moderators were not different in socioeconomic, cognitive or affective profiles. Moreover, both polarisation and moderation can entail deliberatively desired pathways: in the experiment, both polarisers and moderators learned during deliberation, levels of empathy were fairly high on both sides, and group pressures barely mattered. Finally, the low physical presence of immigrants in some discussion groups was associated with polarisation in the anti‐immigrant direction, bolstering longstanding claims regarding the importance of presence for democratic politics.     

Liberalism and Legal Moralism: The Hart-Devlin Debate and Beyond*

Abstract. The legitimate impact of common morality on legal restrictions has been continuously discussed within the Western philosophy of law since Lord Patrick Devlin in the late 1950s presented his moralistic arguments against some liberal conclusions drawn by the English Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution in their public report. Devlin's arguments were subsequently identified and refuted by Richard Wollheim, H. L. A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin, but in a way that later provoked further argument. In particular the attack against anti-moralistic principles set forth by Simon Lee (1986) owes much to the rather naive liberalism represented by the opponents of Devlin. The battle over liberalism and moralism from the Hart-Devlin debate to the present day is reviewed. In addition to the discussion of the philosophers mentioned above, a potential flaw in the argumentation of Joel Feinberg (1986) is considered.     

Solidarity with whom? Why organised labour is losing ground in Continental pension politics

This article explains why the power of organised labour in the reform of Swiss and German pension regimes has faded over the last three decades. Postindustrialisation has brought two different sets of reform issues onto the pension policy agendas of Continental European welfare states: retrenchment of existing benefit levels, and the pension coverage of new, postindustrial social risk groups. Recent pension reforms increasingly combine these two types of measures in encompassing policy packages –‘modernising compromises’– in order to compensate for retrenchment with selective expansive reform elements. Continental trade unions attach a lower importance to postindustrial modernisation than do the left‐wing parties – notably the Social Democrats and the Green parties. Consequently, the distance between the labour movement and the left‐wing parties, as well as intra‐labour heterogeneity, increase and ‘modernising compromises’ tend to divide the left and to marginalise trade unions. The empirical analysis relies on coded actor positions from eight major pension reforms between 1972 and 2003.     

Economic grievances and political protest

How do economic grievances affect citizens’ inclination to protest? Given rising levels of inequality and widespread economic hardship in the aftermath of the Great Recession, this question is crucial for political science: if adverse economic conditions depress citizens’ engagement, as many contributions have argued, then the economic crisis may well feed into a crisis of democracy. However, the existing research on the link between economic grievances and political participation remains empirically inconclusive. It is argued in this article that this is due to two distinct shortcomings, which are effectively addressed by combining the strengths of political economy and social movement theories. Based on ESS and EU-SILC data from 2006–2012, as well as newly collected data on political protest in 28 European countries, a novel, more fine-grained conceptualisation of objective economic grievances considerably improves our understanding of the direct link between economic grievances and protest behaviour. While structural economic disadvantage (i.e., the level of grievances) unambiguously de-mobilises individuals, the deterioration of economic prospects (i.e., a change in grievances) instead increases political activity. Revealing these two countervailing effects provides an important clarification that helps reconcile many seemingly conflicting findings in the existing literature. Second, the article shows that the level of political mobilisation substantially moderates this direct link between individual hardship and political activity. In a strongly mobilised environment, even structural economic disadvantage is no longer an impediment to political participation. There is a strong political message in this interacting factor: if the presence of organised and visible political action is a decisive signal for citizens that conditions the micro-level link between economic grievances and protest, then democracy itself – that is, organised collective action – can help sustain political equality and prevent the vicious circle of democratic erosion.     

Participatory innovations and maxi-publics: The influence of participation possibilities on perceived legitimacy at the local level in Finland

Participatory innovations (PIs) have been introduced as one possible cure to democratic malaises. Empirical research on these mechanisms for citizen participation has, however, focused on their effects on individuals and policy outcomes, leaving aside their consequences for the wider public. This article fills part of the gap by examining the effect of PIs on perceived legitimacy. The article acknowledges that citizens value not only outcomes but also the inclusiveness of decision-making processes, and defines procedural fairness and outcome satisfaction as the key evaluative criteria behind perceived legitimacy. Both total number and type of PIs are considered as possible factors shaping legitimacy evaluations. By analysing data from 9,022 citizens in 30 Finnish municipalities, the article reveals that introducing PIs is not a simple fix for legitimacy of local governments. The type of participation matters, with discursive participation generating the strongest effects on procedural fairness. However, attention should also be paid to citizens’ awareness of participation possibilities.     

Rapporteur-shadow rapporteur networks in the European Parliament: The strength of small numbers

Specialisation and delegation of policy leadership within committees is the norm rather than the exception in legislatures around the world. Yet, little research has studied the sub-groups of lawmakers who serve as policy leaders on particular bills. This article uses conceptual and methodological tools from social network analysis to investigate the groups’ composition and relational structure. It tests the proposition that limited human resources lead lawmakers from small parties to more frequently engage with a greater number of colleagues from other parties across a wider range of policy areas. This may have important relational benefits that have the potential to outweigh the structural disadvantages of small party size. The article examines whether small party lawmakers participate more, are more central and have greater potential for brokerage in policy-making networks, or if the constraints associated with small party size and/or particular ideological leanings prevent their realisation. Empirically, the analyses focus on working relationships between rapporteurs and shadow rapporteurs in the adoption of reports by standing committees of the 7^th European Parliament, 2009–2014. Methodologically, a mixed methods approach is employed. The quantitative analyses show that small party size does not affect legislators’ participation in policy-making networks, but that it increases legislators’ centrality and brokerage potential. Regarding ideology, being committed to democratic participation as a good in itself has a positive association with all three outcomes, while attitudes to European integration show no effect. The qualitative data suggest that the relational benefits of belonging to a small party partially mitigate the structural disadvantages associated with it. They also indicate that policy making in the European Parliament is quite inclusive, as any systematic exclusion tends to be the result of self-marginalisation.     

Class and social policy in the knowledge economy

Recent studies of welfare state attitudes in the knowledge economy find very high generalized support for generous welfare state policies, both among the working and the middle classes. Has class become irrelevant as a predictor of social policy preferences? Or do we simply mis-conceptualise today's class conflict over social policy? To what extent has it changed from a divide over the level of social policy generosity to a divide over the kind of social policy and – more specifically – over the relative importance that should be given to different social policies? Answering these questions is not only relevant to understand welfare politics in the twenty-first century, but electoral politics as well: only when we understand what working- and middle-class voters care about, can we evaluate the role distributive policies play in electoral processes. We use original survey data from eight West European countries to show that middle- and working-class respondents indeed differ in the relative importance they attribute to social investment and social consumption policies. Middle-class respondents consistently attribute higher absolute and relative importance to social investment. We also show that this emphasis on investive policies relates to the middle class expecting better future economic and social opportunities than the working class. This divide in anticipated opportunities underlies a new kind of working- versus middle-class divide, which contributes to transforming the class divide from a conflict over the level of social policy to a conflict over the priorities of social policy.     

Social status,political priorities and unequal representation

Researchers on inequalities in representation debate about whether governments represent the preferences of the rich better than those of less affluent citizens. We argue that problems of high- and low-status citizens are treated differently already at the agenda-setting stage. If affluent and less affluent citizens have different priorities about which issues should be tackled by government, then these divergent group priorities explain why government favours high- over low-status citizens. Due to different levels of visibility, resources and social ties, governments pay more attention to what high-status citizens consider important in their legislative agenda and pay less attention to the issues of low-status citizens. We combined three types of data for our research design. First, we extracted the policy priorities (most important issues) for all status groups from Eurobarometer data between 2002 and 2016 for 10 European countries and matched this information with data on policy outcomes from the Comparative Agendas Project. We then strengthen our results using a focused comparison of three single country studies over longer time series. We show that a priority gap exists and has representational consequences. Our analysis has important implications for the understanding of the unequal representation of status groups as it sheds light on an important, yet so far unexplored, aspect of the political process. Since the misrepresentation of political agendas occurs at the very beginning of the policy-making process, the consequences are potentially even more severe than for the unequal treatment of preferences.     

Majority representation and legitimacy: Survey-experimental evidence from the European Union

What can policy makers do in day-to-day decision making to strengthen citizens' belief that the political system is legitimate? Much literature has highlighted that the realization of citizens' personal preferences in policy making is an important driver of legitimacy beliefs. We argue that citizens, in addition, also care about whether a policy represents the preferences of the majority of citizens, even if their personal preference diverges from the majority's. Using the case of the European Union (EU) as a system that has recurringly experienced crises of public legitimacy, we conduct a vignette survey experiment in which respondents assess the legitimacy of fictitious EU decisions that vary in how they were taken and whose preferences they represent. Results from original surveys conducted in the five largest EU countries show that the congruence of EU decisions not only with personal opinion but also with different forms of majority opinion significantly strengthens legitimacy beliefs. We also show that the most likely mechanism behind this finding is the application of a ‘consensus heuristic’, by which respondents use majority opinion as a cue to identify legitimate decisions. In contrast, procedural features such as the consultation of interest groups or the inclusiveness of decision making in the institutions have little effect on legitimacy beliefs. These findings suggest that policy makers can address legitimacy deficits by strengthening majority representation, which will have both egotropic and sociotropic effects.     

Effects of preconceptions on deception detection and new answers to why lie-catchers often fail

Abstract

This study investigated the extent to which crediting and discrediting background information, given to observers before they watched three video-taped interviews with the same witness, affected their veracity judgments. Our analyses show that the observers' distribution of truth/lie-judgments were more affected by crediting than discrediting background information. We also mapped the subjective cues given to justify the truth/lie-judgments, and found that the most frequently used cue was whether or not the three statements were consistent over time. In addition, our analysis revealed two types of inter-observer disagreements. One type referred to how different cues were perceived (e.g., forty observers perceived the three statements as being inconsistent over time while an equal number perceived the same three statements as being consistent over time). The second type referred to how different cues were used (e.g., the fact that the witness was perceived as not being confident in his testimony worked against him equally as often as it worked for him).