According to spatial models of elections, citizen perceptions of party policy positions are a key determinant of voting choices. Yet recent scholarship from Europe suggests that voters do not adjust their perceptions according to what parties advocate in their campaigns. This article argues that voters develop a more accurate understanding of parties’ ideological positions following a leadership change because a new leader increases the credibility of party policy offerings. Focusing on Western European parties in the 1979–2012 period, it shows that having a new leader is a necessary condition for voters to more accurately perceive the left–right placements of opposition parties. Voters do not use party platforms to form perceptions of incumbent parties’ positions, regardless of whether the leader is new or veteran. These results have important implications for models of party competition and democratic representation.

Political competition is expected to become less particularistic as prosperity rises and a middle class emerges. But particularistic linkages persist despite rising wealth in urban Ghana. Politicians are unable to commit to campaign promises with voters who want large-scale public policies, many of whom are in the middle class. This creates incentives to avoid mobilizing many of these voters and to ignore their preferences. As a result, voters who want major public policies rather than patronage differentially refrain from participation, allowing poorer voters to dominate the electorate and party organizations. This may only reinforce politicians’ disincentives to make policy appeals, and stall the emergence of more policy-based electoral competition even as the middle class grows.

This article examines the relationship between third-party actors and the intentional targeting of non-combatants in interstate war. It argues that war participants kill fewer civilians in war when their expectation of third-party punishment is high. Combatants will anticipate a high likelihood of third-party sanctions when their alliance and trade networks are dominated by third parties that have ratified international treaties prohibiting the intentional targeting of non-combatants. The study hypothesizes that war combatants kill fewer civilians in war as the strength of ratifiers within their alliance and trade networks increases. Quantitative tests on a dataset of all interstate wars from 1900–2003 provide strong statistical and substantive support for this hypothesis.

What explains variation in the tactical choices of non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? This article uses network autocorrelation models to establish how the tactical choices of climate change NGOs are shaped by their embeddedness in transnational advocacy networks. Specifically, it finds that NGOs are more likely to adopt protest tactics when adjacent organizations – those with whom they have direct ties – have already done so. The choices of equivalent organizations – those that occupy similar relational roles in the network – do not appear to be influential. Qualitative evidence also shows that NGOs are affected by relational pressure from their peers, which alters their perception of costs and benefits. These findings enhance understanding of how networks influence actors’ behavior and offer insights into the relational processes that generate protest in global politics.

In an influential study, Matthew Gentzkow found that the introduction of TV in the United States caused a major drop in voter turnout. In contrast, the current analysis shows that public broadcasting TV can increase political participation. Detailed data on the rollout of television in Norway in the 1960s and 1970s are combined with municipality-level data on voter turnout over a period of four decades. The date of access to TV signals was mostly a side effect of geography, a feature that is used to identify causal effects. Additional analyses exploit individual-level panel data from three successive election studies. The new TV medium instantly became a major source of political information. It triggered political interest and caused a modest, but statistically significant, increase in voter turnout.

Labor unions play a prominent role in the economy and in politics, and have long been depicted by opponents as an overly powerful, corrupt and economically harmful institution. In labor-related news in recent years, anti-union rhetoric has regularly focused on union workers themselves, frequently portraying them as overpaid, greedy and undeserving of their wealth, while also drawing a contrast between the compensation of union vs. non-union workers. This type of rhetoric is referred to here as class-based anti-union rhetoric (CAR). Despite its prevalence, it remains unknown whether CAR affects public opinion toward unions. This study uses a series of national survey experiments to demonstrate that exposure to CAR reduces the perceived similarity of targeted union workers, unions’ perceived deservingness of public support and support for pro-union legislation. Moreover, CAR repeatedly nullified or reversed the otherwise positive relationship between the strength of worker identity and solidarity with union workers.

This article presents results from survey experiments investigating conditions under which Britons are willing to pay taxes on polluting activities. People are no more willing if revenues are hypothecated for spending on environmental protection, while making such taxes more relevant to people – by naming petrol and electricity as products to which they will apply – has a modestly negative effect. Public willingness increases sharply if people are told that new environmental taxes would be offset by cuts to other taxes, but political distrust appears to undermine much of this effect. Previous studies have argued that political trust shapes public opinion with respect to environmental and many other policies. But this article provides the first experimental evidence suggesting that the relationship is causal, at least for one specific facet: cynicism about public officials’ honesty and integrity. The results suggest a need to make confidence in the trustworthiness of public officials and their promises more central to conceptualizations of political trust.

The Treaty of Lisbon strengthened the role of national parliaments in the European Union. It introduced an ‘early warning system’, granting parliamentary chambers the right to reject legislative proposals by the European Commission. Previous studies assumed independence between the decisions of parliaments to reject a legislative proposal. We apply recent advances in inferential network analysis and argue that parliamentary vetoes are better explained by conceptualizing parliaments’ veto actions as a temporal network. Network effects can be observed along the dimension of party families. Based on a new permutation approach, we find that parliaments with similar party majorities influence each other over the course of the decision period (‘social influence’), rather than basing their decisions independently on joint prior partisanship (‘selection’).

How does a party’s organizational structure affect its chances of becoming a national party? While existing explanations of party nationalization focus on country-level institutional and societal variables, we argue that aspects of party organization such as the degree of centralization of authority, ideological unity and leadership factionalism also matter. By bringing the analysis to the party level, this article provides a multilevel analysis of institutional and party organization variables and disentangles the effect of each set of influences. We use original data on party organization and party nationalization for 142 parties across twenty European countries. This research contributes to the literature on nationalization and party development by advancing organizational strategies which parties could adopt in different social and institutional environments.

In contrast to much of the political economy literature, this article explores acts of refusal that obstruct attempts to impose austerity measures on advanced industrial democracies. It thereby complements a literature that has thus far focused far more upon the (apparently unobstructed) imposition of austerity. In doing so, it uses two typically ‘low-resistance’ countries – Japan and the UK –as least-likely cases and finds that austerity is rarely uncontested. Using fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, it highlights the ‘causal recipes’ sufficient for both (1) anti-austerity activity to have a significant impact on austerity proposals and (2) the smooth (unobstructed) imposition of austerity. The politics of austerity is shown to be better understood as an iterative interaction between proposals for austerity and the acts of refusal they encounter. These obstacles to austerity appear more straightforward to activate effectively in Japan’s coordinated model of capitalism, whilst the UK’s liberal market economy tends to generate more innovative forms of dissent that (if they are sufficiently militant) provide an alternative route towards the obstruction of austerity.

This study investigates how antidiscrimination policy and related policy knowledge influence citizens’ support for the democratic system and its institutions. The article argues that antidiscrimination measures and knowledge about rights to equal treatment foster perceptions of government responsiveness, which increase political support among target groups and citizens who advocate egalitarianism. Utilizing a longitudinal design and more valid measures to resolve causality issues, the results of the empirical models show that increases in policy knowledge over time systematically predict higher political support, especially among individuals who hold egalitarian values. Individuals who are discriminated against express particularly high political support in contexts where antidiscrimination laws are expanded. Overall, the results amplify the role of policy knowledge as a key factor in studying policy feedback effects.

A vast amount of experimental evidence suggests that get-out-the-vote encouragements delivered through door-to-door canvassing have large effects on turnout. Most of the existing studies have been conducted in the United States, and are inspiring European mobilization campaigns. This article explores the empirical question of whether the American findings are applicable to Europe. It combines existing European studies and presents two new Danish studies to show that the pooled point estimate of the effect is substantially smaller in Europe than in the United States, and finds no effects in the two Danish experiments. The article discusses why the effects seem to be different in Europe compared to the United States, and stresses the need for further experiments in Europe as there is still considerable uncertainty regarding the European effects. While one possible explanation is that differences in turnout rates explain the differences in effect sizes, the empirical analysis finds no strong relationship between turnout and effect sizes in either Europe or the United States.

The right–left dimension is ubiquitous in politics, but prior perspectives provide conflicting accounts of whether cultural and economic attitudes are typically aligned on this dimension within mass publics around the world. Using survey data from ninety-nine nations, this study finds not only that right–left attitude organization is uncommon, but that it is more common for culturally and economically right-wing attitudes to correlate negatively with each other, an attitude structure reflecting a contrast between desires for cultural and economic protection vs. freedom. This article examines where, among whom and why protection–freedom attitude organization outweighs right–left attitude organization, and discusses the implications for the psychological bases of ideology, quality of democratic representation and the rise of extreme right politics in the West.

The recent spate of mass public shootings in the United States raises important questions about how these tragic events might impact mass opinion and public policy. Integrating research on focusing events, contextual effects and perceived threat, this article stipulates that residing near a mass shooting should increase support for gun control by making the threat of gun violence more salient. Drawing upon multiple data sources on mass public shootings paired with large-N survey data, it demonstrates that increased proximity to a mass shooting is associated with heightened public support for stricter gun control. Importantly, the results show that this effect does not vary by partisanship, but does vary as a function of salience-related event factors, such as repetition, magnitude and recency. Critically, the core result is replicated using panel data. Together, these results suggest a process of context-driven policy feedback between existing gun laws, egregious gun violence and demand for policy change.

What explains states’ sub-national territorial reach? While large parts of the state-building literature have focused on national capabilities, little is known about the determinants of the unevenness of state presence at the sub-national level. This article seeks to fill this gap by looking at early attempts at state building: it investigates the processes of state penetration in the former colony of German East Africa. Contrary to previous studies – which largely emphasized antecedent or structural factors – the current study argues that geographical patterns of state penetration have been driven by the state’s strategic imperative to solidify control over territory and establish political stability. The article tests these propositions using an original, geo-referenced grid-cell dataset for the years 1890 to 1909 based on extensive historical records in German colonial yearbooks and maps.

Procedural fairness theory posits that the way in which authoritative decisions are made strongly impacts people’s willingness to accept them. This article challenges this claim by contending that democratic governments can achieve little in terms of acceptance of policy decisions by the procedural means at their disposal. Instead, outcome favorability is the dominant determinant of decision acceptance. The article explicates that while central parts of procedural fairness theory are true, outcome favorability is still overwhelmingly the strongest determinant of individuals’ willingness to accept authoritative decisions. It improves on previous research by locating all key variables into one causal model and testing this model using appropriate data. Findings from a large number of experiments (both vignette and field) reproduce the expected relationships from previous research and support the additional predictions.

Although the Paris Agreement arguably made some progress, interest in supplementary approaches to climate change co-operation persist. This article examines the conditions under which a climate club might emerge and grow. Using agent-based simulations, it shows that even with less than a handful of major actors as initial members, a club can eventually reduce global emissions effectively. To succeed, a club must be initiated by the ‘right’ constellation of enthusiastic actors, offer sufficiently large incentives for reluctant countries and be reasonably unconstrained by conflicts between members over issues beyond climate change. A climate club is particularly likely to persist and grow if initiated by the United States and the European Union. The combination of club-good benefits and conditional commitments can produce broad participation under many conditions.

This article explores if (and how) national elections affect the chances of concluding an international agreement. Drawing on a literature about the informational efficiency of elections, it examines how political uncertainty in the run-up to an election impacts the dynamics of international negotiations. Using the case of decision making in the European Union (EU), it finds that (1) pending national elections significantly reduce the chances of reaching an agreement at the international level (2) this effect is strongest during close elections with uncertain outcomes and (3) the effect is particularly pronounced in the case of elections in larger member states. The findings highlight the fruitfulness of further research on the dynamics between national and international politics. The article has positive and normative implications for the literature on two-level games, international negotiations and legislative bargaining in the EU.

Can rebel organizations in a civil conflict use social media to garner international support? This article argues that the use of social media is a unique form of public diplomacy through which rebels project a favorable image to gain that support. It analyzes the Libyan civil war, during which rebels invested considerable resources in diplomatic efforts to gain US support. The study entails collecting original data, and finds that rebel public diplomacy via Twitter increases co-operation with the rebels when their message (1) clarifies the type of regime they intend to create and (2) emphasizes the atrocities perpetrated by the government. Providing rebels with an important tool of image projection, social media can affect dynamics in an ever more connected international arena.