Because they are now members of most Western European parliaments, Populist Radical Right Parties (PRRPs) have the potential to influence the formulation of socio-economic policies. However, scholarly attention so far has nearly exclusively focussed on the impact of PRRPs on what is considered their ‘core issue’, that is migration policy. In this paper, we provide the first mixed methods comparative study of the impact of PRRPs on redistributive and (de-)regulative economic policies. Combining quantitative data with qualitative case studies, our results show that the participation of PRRPs in right-wing governments has noteworthy implications for socio-economic policies. Due to the heterogeneous constituencies of PRRPs, these parties not only refrain from welfare state retrenchment but are also less inclined to engage in deregulation compared with right-wing governments without PRRP participation.

Various scholars have argued and demonstrated that Western European populist parties have something in common. Although these parties adhere to various ideologies and employ different organizational forms and political styles, they all endorse a similar set of ideas concerning the relationship between the people and the elite. Yet despite our increasing knowledge about these parties, so far we know only very little about populist voters. Do the voter bases of populist parties also have something in common? To answer that question, I focus on the electorates of 15 prototypical populist parties from 11 Western European countries. I show that, in contrast with widely held beliefs, the electorates of populist parties do not always consist of individuals who are more likely to be ‘losers of globalization’ with Eurosceptic attitudes, low levels of political trust, and preferences for (more) direct democracy. This suggests that ‘the’ populist voter does not exist.

This article looks at what good and bad governments do when performing one of their most central functions, namely public procurement. Some 1.5 million public contracts from across Europe are analyzed through statistical models that compare contracting patterns between good- and poor-governance regions. At the most basic level, the results can be interpreted as a rejection of a conventional view of the relation between governance and institutional choices and outcomes. It is not the case that poorly governed jurisdictions allow more discretion to public officials, that they impose more limits on access to markets, or that they clearly feature more competition, and in fact the opposite often holds. Going beyond this negative finding, the article argues that an alternative view of institutional choice and its connection with governance, in which some discretion and flexibility is desirable, can provide a better explanation of observed patterns, and can have important implications for institutional design.

Existing literature has analysed the relationship between electoral systems and either corruption or satisfaction with democracy (SWD) focussing on the traditional distinction between majoritarian and proportional systems. This paper, instead, investigates if and how specific aspects of electoral systems moderate the negative effects of corruption perceptions on SWD. We argue that two mechanisms act simultaneously but at different levels. The first mechanism is the relationship between voters and the national government, while the second links single representatives to their constituents. We advance conditional hypotheses that postulate an attenuating effect of disproportionality and a reinforcing impact of personal vote. Empirical results from 35 elections in 33 democracies, using both individual and aggregate-level data, confirm the research hypotheses. More disproportional electoral systems weaken the impact of citizens’ perceived corruption on their democratic satisfaction, while this is strengthened by systems in which the ballot control is mostly in the hand of the voters.

Inclusiveness is essential to deliberative democracy, but factors influencing citizens’ willingness to participate in deliberation need to be better understood. In the case of deliberative minipublics, demographic, and attitudinal attributes demonstrably correlate with willingness to participate, and thus arguably affect the inclusiveness of deliberative events. Similarly, features of deliberative situations also influence participation – whether it will be decisive, for example. However, what is lacking is a framework for how individual and situational characteristics interact, and the role of background political and cultural settings in influencing this dynamic. Advances in personality psychology offers a useful framework for addressing this lacuna, as well as providing tools for understanding how effective participation can be enhanced. In this article, I explore how personality interacts with situational features to influence patterns of deliberative participation, as well as the motivations that are associated. These effects are illustrated by drawing on data from a field experiment, involving minipublic deliberation in Sweden on the issue of begging by internal EU migrants. The findings support the relevance of personality as a predictor of participation in deliberation, which interacts with features of deliberative situations to induce particular motivations to either participate or refuse.

This study examines whether or not political representation in the Netherlands is biased toward the rich and higher educated by comparing the political orientations of members of parliament to those of the electorate. The analyses reveal stark differences in the representation of different socio-economic groups. The political views of elected national representatives are far more similar to those of rich, higher educated citizens than to those with less income and education. Moreover, a longitudinal analysis reveals that inequalities in political representation have actually grown in recent years. We also show that the use of measures of ideological self-identification might to lead to highly misleading results regarding the nature of political representation as opposed to the use of issue items. We conclude that, despite a highly proportional electoral system, the views which are represented in the Dutch lower house of parliament contain major distortions of the views of the broader electorate.

Middle-aged to senior men of the ethnic majority and higher income groups are generally overrepresented in parliaments. While research on group representation has examined issues of gender, economic standing, and, more recently, ethnicity, few studies examine age groups. We argue that the design of political institutions influences the share of young adults in parliaments across nations and hypothesize that the electoral system type, age candidacy requirements, and quotas influence the share of younger deputies in national parliaments. Analyzing an original data set with a global cross-national sample, we find that proportional representation and giving candidates the right to stand in elections as early as possible (i.e. at the age of 18) matter. In contrast, quota provisions for youths are currently too selectively applied to increase the percentage of young deputies in parliament.