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This report explores challenges to political participation of mobile EU citizens in Denmark. It discusses electoral rights of non-resident citizens and non-citizen residents from the EU in European Parliament and local elections. The report also offers recommendations on how to increase political participation of mobile EU citizens in this country. ; This report was funded by the European Union's Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme (2014-2020). The content of this report represents the views of the author only and is his/her sole responsibility. The European Commission does not accept any responsibility for use that may be made of the information it contains.

Deliberation is the current buzzword among democratic thinkers. Deliberative democracy assumes that deliberation has an effect on the people engaging in the deliberative process. Several studies have demonstrated that this is indeed the case: deliberation increases political knowledge and opinion consistency, as well as mutual understanding and broader tolerance among citizens. In order to verify the findings from these studies and to confront the problems of internal and external validity in the previous studies of deliberation, alternative methodological designs must be applied. Applying an experimental split‐sample design using CATI on the Danish electorate reveals how arguments and frames influence public opinion. Across various frames and arguments and political issues, positive (negative) arguments tend to push opinions in a positive (negative) direction. When competing frames are presented to the public, people submit to neither ambivalence nor non‐attitudes. Quite to the contrary, people tend to follow their predisposition and provide more consistent opinions. Thus, deliberation composed of various competing frames and arguments facilitates – rather than distorts – sophisticated and considered public opinion.

Survey response rates have declined over recent years as busy people have come to resent interruptions during their mealtime & leisure hours at home. Results are presented of a study analyzing the effect of incentives (lottery travel or grocery vouchers or nothing), announced interview length (15 or 20 minutes), & interviewer characteristics on response rates in a computer assisted telephone interview (CATI) survey of Danish voters regarding general political issues. Of a net sample of 4,784 households, the fully completed interview rate was 2,000 & the refusal rate 2,076. The declining response rate is thus due to refusal, often seemingly due to interviewer characteristics. A shorter interview length increased response rate by 25%. Incentives played a lesser though still significant role. Because interviewer experience positively influenced response rate, better training for interviewers is suggested. Tables, References. J. Stanton

Better understanding of attitudes toward immigration is crucial to avoid misperception of immigration in the public debate. Through two identical online survey experiments applying morphed faces of non-Western immigrants and textual vignettes, the authors manipulate complexion, education, family background, and gender in Denmark and Germany. For women, an additional split in which half of the women wore a headscarf is performed. In both countries, highly skilled immigrants are preferred to low-skilled immigrants. Danes are more skeptical toward non-Western immigration than Germans. Essentially, less educated Danes are very critical of accepting non-Western immigrants in their country. It is suggested that this difference is driven by a large welfare state in Denmark compared to Germany, suggesting a stronger fear in welfare societies that immigrants will exploit welfare benefits.

Utilizing a large and unique dataset composed of government records, we study the widely contested effect of co-ethnic residential concentrations on voter turnout. Non-Western immigrants are moderately affected by the concentration of co-ethnic voters in their neighborhoods. As the local concentration of same-ethnicity voters increases, so does the individual's propensity to turn out for the election. In general, the concentration of non-Western immigrants in the neighborhood has only a very limited impact on an immigrant's propensity to vote. Finally, we investigate the possible mobilizing effect of local candidates and, in particular, local co-ethnic candidates on voter turnout. We find that the presence of candidates in general and co-ethnic candidates running for office in a neighborhood has a moderate positive mobilization effect. However, taking this factor into account, the effect of residential concentrations was not eliminated.

Do public employees vote more frequently than private employees? The turnout of public employees has been of central interest to public choice scholars for almost a century. Utilizing a government records dataset that is not subject to over-reporting and differential social desirability bias, we find that public employees voted 11-12 percentage points more than their counterparts in the private sector. In a multivariate analysis, however, the effect is only four to five percentage points greater for local government public employees, which is in the lower range of previous studies. We are able to distinguish between local government and central government employees and show that the latter vote two percentage points less than the former. Controlling for the specific type of educational background does not explain the public-private turnout differential. Finally, the effect of working and voting in the same municipality is larger for local government employees than other citizens. This is in accordance with their greater incentives as they elect their future employer, though the effect size is surprisingly small. Adapted from the source document.