This article makes a positive case for an ethnographic sensibility in political theory. Drawing on published ethnographies and original fieldwork, it argues that an ethnographic sensibility can contribute to normative reflection in five distinct ways. It can help uncover the nature of situated normative demands (epistemic argument); diagnose obstacles encountered when responding to these demands (diagnostic argument); evaluate practices and institutions against a given set of values (evaluative argument); probe, question and refine our understanding of values (valuational argument); and uncover underlying social ontologies (ontological argument). The contribution of ethnography to normative theory is distinguished from that of other forms of empirical research, and the dangers of perspectival absorption, bias and particularism are addressed.

External threats such as war have been shown to disrupt representation as politicians ‘put politics aside’ and cooperate across cleavages. This article examines whether a severe economic crisis can have a similar effect. It introduces a new approach that provides a spatial representation of how political parties represent societal actors in their public interactions, based on more than 140,000 machine coded news events from eleven eurozone countries between 2001 and 2011. The study shows that in bad economic times, there is a compression of political representation: parties’ relationships with the societal groups they are closest to become less cooperative, while their relationships with the groups they are least close to become less conflictual.

Do democratic dyads handle their disputes more peacefully than non-democratic dyads, or have they cleared the most contentious issues (that is, unsettled borders) off their foreign policy agenda before becoming democratic? This study compares the conflicting answers of the democratic peace and the territorial peace and examines the empirical record to see which is more accurate. It finds that almost all contiguous dyads settle their borders before they become joint democracies. Furthermore, the majority of non-contiguous dyad members also settle their borders with all neighboring states before their non-contiguous dyad becomes jointly democratic. Such findings are consistent with the theoretical expectations of the territorial peace, rather than the democratic peace. They also weaken a core argument of the democratic peace, for this analysis finds that one reason democratic dyads may handle their disputes more peacefully than non-democratic dyads is not because of their institutions or norms, but rather because they have dispensed with the disputes most likely to involve the use of military force prior to becoming democratic.

Recent research on parliamentary institutions has demonstrated that legislatures featuring strong committees play an important role in shaping government policy. However, the impact of the legislators who lead these committees – committee chairs – is poorly understood. This study provides the first examination of whether the partisan control of committee chairs in parliamentary systems has a systematic impact on legislative scrutiny. The article argues that committee chairs can, in principle, use their significant agenda powers to serve two purposes: providing opposition parties with a greater ability to scrutinize government policy proposals, and enabling government parties to better police one another. Analyzing the legislative histories of 1,100 government bills in three parliamentary democracies, the study finds that control of committee chairs significantly strengthens the ability of opposition parties to engage in legislative review. The analysis also suggests that government parties’ ability to monitor their coalition allies does not depend on control of committee chairs.

Does evidence help politicians make informed decisions even if it is at odds with their prior beliefs? And does providing more evidence increase the likelihood that politicians will be enlightened by the information? Based on the literature on motivated political reasoning and the theory about affective tipping points, this article hypothesizes that politicians tend to reject evidence that contradicts their prior attitudes, but that increasing the amount of evidence will reduce the impact of prior attitudes and strengthen their ability to interpret the information correctly. These hypotheses are examined using randomized survey experiments with responses from 954 Danish politicians, and results from this sample are compared to responses from similar survey experiments with Danish citizens. The experimental findings strongly support the hypothesis that politicians are biased by prior attitudes when interpreting information. However, in contrast to expectations, the findings show that the impact of prior attitudes increases when more evidence is provided.

While the ‘critical citizens’ literature shows that publics often evaluate democracies negatively, much less is known about ‘critical parties’, especially mainstream ones. This article develops a model to explain empirical variation in parties’ evaluations of democratic institutions, based on two mechanisms: first, that parties’ regime access affects their regime support, which, secondly, is moderated by over-time habituation to democracy. Using expert surveys of all electorally significant parties in twenty-four European countries in 2008 and 2013, the results show that parties evaluate institutions positively when they have regular access to a regime, regardless of their ideology and the regime’s duration. Moreover, regime duration affects stances indirectly by providing democracies with a buffer against an incumbent’s electoral defeat in the most recent election. The findings point to heightened possibilities for parties to negatively evaluate democracies given the increased volatility in party systems in Europe.

A long tradition of studies in political science has unveiled the effects of electoral institutions on party systems and parliamentary representation. Yet their effects on campaign activities remain overlooked. Research in this tradition still lacks a strong comparative element able to explore the nuanced role of electoral institutions in shaping individual-level campaigns during first-order parliamentary elections. This study uses data from a variety of national candidate studies to address this lacuna, and shows that the structure of electoral institutions affects the electoral mobilization efforts put in place by candidates. Candidate-centred electoral systems incentivize more intense and complex mobilization efforts, and shift the campaign focus towards individuals rather than parties. By directly addressing the effects of electoral institutions on campaign behaviour, this study contributes to the wider debate on their role in promoting political engagement and mobilization. These results indicate that electoral institutions affect political competition much more than previously thought.

Some parties are more popular among men, while other parties attract more female voters. This article proposes that these differences can be partially explained by two recurring gender differences in the socio-psychological literature. It argues that men’s generally lower sensitivity to social cues makes them more likely to vote for stigmatized and small parties, whereas women’s greater concern with social harmony is expected to make them less likely to vote for extreme parties. The models are tested at the individual and party levels using three waves of Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data from twenty-eight countries. Ceteris paribus, men are more likely than women to vote for parties that are socially stigmatized or ideologically extreme. This has consequences for the current understanding of gender gaps in voting, and reiterates that voting has important social aspects.

Do changes in health lead to changes in the probability of voting? Using two longitudinal datasets, this article looks at the impact of three measures of health – physical health, mental health and overall well-being – on voting trajectories in young adulthood. The results show that self-rated health is associated with a lower probability of voting in one’s first election, depression is related to a decline in turnout over time and physical limitations are unrelated to voting. Some familial resources from childhood are also found to condition when the health–participation effect manifests.