Search results

Since the end of the Cold War, the EU aims to advance to a relevant and autonomous actor in international politics—especially concerning security and defense politics. Scholars interested in whether the EU member states actually converge in their security and defense preferences often analyze strategy papers qualitatively, focusing on selected countries at specific points in time. In this article, we propose a dictionary approach for analyzing the development of security and defense preferences within the EU over the last three decades using quantitative text analysis. We make use of 163 strategy papers, published by all EU member states and the EU itself since 1994. The findings show that EU member states react similarly to international events, but do not converge substantially in their preferences. Furthermore, there is no substantial convergence to the position of the EU itself. We finally discuss usefulness and validity of quantitative text analysis in comparative research more broadly.

European integration considerably changes public discourses in the member states of the European Union. In this work, I examine the conditions for the Europeanization of public discourse and the nature of Europeanized public discourse. According to a theoretical framework building on postfunctionalist theories of European integration, mainstream opposition and challenger parties with strong positive and negative preferences on European integration have incentives to strategically shape Europeanized public discourse. I test several hypotheses considering three important political issues - economy, security and migration - using a self-compiled data set of about 3 million newspaper articles in 24 different languages from all EU member states retrieved from the Internet Archive between 2016 and 2019. The results indicate that mainstream opposition and challenger parties increase the saliency of Europeanized public discourse. Furthermore, the polarization of Europeanized public discourse builds upon the interaction of challenger parties with strong preferences on European integration and mainstream opposition parties. This work provides a framework and first empirical evidence on the Europeanization of public discourses in all EU member states, using multi-lingual quantitative text analysis on a large data set retrieved from the Internet Archive.

AbstractDemocracies without democrats are not sustainable. Yet, recent studies have argued that Western citizens are turning their backs on the system of self-governance, thereby eroding the societal foundations of consolidated democracies. This study contributes to discussions about citizen support of democracy by (1) analyzing new cross-national survey data in 18 European countries that facilitate assessments of the temporal and geographical generalizability of previous findings, (2) disentangling age, cohort and period effects, thereby aligning the analytical methods with the theoretical arguments and (3) transparently reporting all evidence derived from pre-registered analyses to avoid cherry-picked findings. The findings show that citizens of consolidated democracies continue to endorse self-governance. Yet in some (but not all) countries, there is evidence of a growing number of 'democrats in name only', particularly among the young generation. These findings suggest a second phase in research on democratic fatigue that broadens the analytical scope for the multi-faceted nature of democratic support.

A stable democratic society is unthinkable if its citizens oppose the principles of self-governance. Yet, recent studies suggest that citizens of consolidated democracies increasingly turn their backs on this system of government. Nonetheless, the evidence is mixed and mainly focuses on attitudes toward democracy as a generic concept, while less is known about mass support for the liberal variant of democracy. This study contributes to this debate by 1) analyzing citizen attitudes toward core elements of liberal democracy in addition to direct measures of democratic support and 2) separating age, period, and cohort effects. We investigated the development of democracy-related attitudes in probability-based samples collected in Germany from 1982 through 2018. Although Germany's Eastern region can be considered a likely case of democratic deconsolidation, the analysis did not provide evidence for a decline in support of democracy as a generic concept or its fundamental principles in West or East Germany.

A stable democratic society is unthinkable if its citizens oppose the principles of self-governance. Yet, recent studies suggest that citizens of consolidated democracies increasingly turn their backs on this system of government. Nonetheless, the evidence is mixed and mainly focuses on attitudes toward democracy as a generic concept, while less is known about mass support for the liberal variant of democracy. This study contributes to this debate by 1) analyzing citizen attitudes toward core elements of liberal democracy in addition to direct measures of democratic support and 2) separating age, period, and cohort effects. We investigated the development of democracy-related attitudes in probability-based samples collected in Germany from 1982 through 2018. Although Germany's Eastern region can be considered a likely case of democratic deconsolidation, the analysis did not provide evidence for a decline in support of democracy as a generic concept or its fundamental principles in West or East Germany.

Democracies without democrats are not sustainable. Yet, recent studies argue that Western citizens are turning their backs on the system of self-governance, thereby eroding the societal foundations of consolidated democracies. We contribute to discussions about citizen support of democracy by 1) analyzing new cross-national survey data in 18 European countries that enable assessing the temporal and geographical generalizability of previous findings; 2) disentangling age-, cohort-, and period effects, thereby aligning the analytical methods with the theoretical arguments; 3) transparently reporting the entire evidence derived from pre-registered analyses to avoid cherrypicked findings. Our findings show that citizens of consolidated democracies continue to endorse self-governance. Yet, in some but not all countries, there is evidence for a growing number of 'democrats in name only', particularly among the young generation. These findings suggest a second phase in research on democratic fatigue that broadens the analytical scope for the multi-faceted nature of democratic support.

Abstract
Cognitive interviewing in the form of probing is key for developing methodologically sound survey questions. For a long time, probing was tied to the laboratory setting, making it difficult to achieve large sample sizes and creating a time-intensive undertaking for both researchers and participants. Web surveys paved the way for administering probing questions over the Internet in a time- and cost-efficient manner. In so-called web probing studies, respondents first answer a question and then they receive one or more open-ended questions about their response process, with requests for written answers. However, participants frequently provide very short or no answers at all to open-ended questions, in part because answering questions in writing is tedious. This is especially the case when the web survey is completed via a smartphone with a virtual on-screen keypad that shrinks the viewing space. In this study, we examine whether the problem of short and uninterpretable answers in web probing studies can be mitigated by asking respondents to complete the web survey on a smartphone and to record their answers via the built-in microphone. We conducted an experiment in a smartphone survey (N = 1,001), randomizing respondents to different communication modes (written or oral) for answering two comprehension probes about two questions on national identity and citizenship. The results indicate that probes with requests for oral answers produce four to five times more nonresponse than their written counterparts. However, oral answers contain about three times as many words, include about 0.3 more themes (first probing question only), and the proportion of clearly interpretable answers is about 6 percentage points higher (for the first probing question only). Nonetheless, both communication modes result in similar themes mentioned by respondents.

The smartphone increase in web surveys, coupled with technological developments, provides novel opportunities for measuring attitudes. For example, smartphones allow the collection of voice instead of text answers by using the built-in microphone. This may facilitate answering questions with open answer formats resulting in richer information and higher data quality. So far, there is only a little body of research investigating voice and text answers to open questions. In this study, we therefore compare the linguistic and content characteristics of voice and text answers to open questions on sensitive topics. For this purpose, we ran an experiment in a smartphone survey ( N = 1001) and randomly assigned respondents to an answer format condition (text or voice). The findings indicate that voice answers have a higher number of words and a higher number of topics than their text counterparts. We find no differences regarding sentiments (or extremity of answers). Our study provides new insights into the linguistic and content characteristics of voice and text answers. Furthermore, it helps to evaluate the usefulness and usability of voice answers for future smartphone surveys.

Dieses Buch analysiert, wie Bürger während der Bundestagswahlkämpfe 2009 und 2013 über die Teilnahme an der Wahl und die Wahl einer Partei entschieden. Mithilfe von Daten aus den sieben Wellen der Wahlkampfpanels der German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) wird gezeigt, dass sich das Wahlverhalten und diesem vorgelagerte politische Einstellungen im Laufe dieser Wahlkämpfe veränderten. Tatsächlich beeinflussten die Kampagnen der Parteien, Wahlkampfereignisse und politische Kontroversen das Wahlverhalten. Das gilt nicht nur für bestimmte Teile der Wählerschaft. Wirkungen traten bei politisch wenig und stark Interessierten auf, bei nicht parteigebundenen Personen wie auch bei Parteianhängern. Infolge des Wahlkampfes kehrten einige Parteianhänger zu ihrer Partei zurück, während sich andere von dieser abwandten. Im deutschen Mehrparteiensystem spielen Wahlkämpfe somit eine Rolle für das individuelle Wahlverhalten und sollten daher als eigenständiger Faktor ernstgenommen werden

Populist discourse—which tends to benefit anti-systemic parties—has been on the rise in the world's democratic states. Powerful non-democratic states have both the means and the incentive to spread such discourse to democratic states. We clarify the incentives illiberal states have to produce such communication, and delineate how this type of political communication fuses traditional state-to-state propaganda with election interventions. We draw on the case of Kremlin-sponsored communication on the issue of refugees in Germany to illustrate the mechanisms through which the discourse operates in target countries. We create a corpus of over a million news stories to identify the prevalence of illiberal discourse and its timing relative to Germany's elections. We show that the Kremlin intervened in the 2017 federal elections by promoting refugee stories over and above the rate at which German outlets did. We discuss the broader implications for the use of directed political communication as a form of election intervention.