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AbstractIn the course of election campaigns, voters pay only selectively attention to particular aspects of political problems. Such selective attention is necessary because the costs of becoming competent on many political problems are great. Normatively, however, such selective attention is not desirable because it lowers the chance that voters will reach well‐balanced and competent decisions. This contribution establishes the aspects of the four most salient problems from the 2015 Swiss federal election campaign: immigration, welfare, the economy and European integration. It further reveals that selective attention is higher among those who are interested in politics and who learn problem‐specific information on salient problems, and lower among those who are well‐educated, who engage in personal discussions, who use traditional media, and who learn problem‐specific information on less salient problems. Finally, it concludes that selective attention should be avoided in order to strengthen the citizens' level of information on political problems.

Political parties are under increasing pressure to extend and activate their voter bases by employing more innovative communication strategies. This article focuses on the social media platform Twitter to explore how well Swiss parties performed in terms of employing digital communication during the 2015 federal election campaign. As such, it uses the follower network as an indicator of organizational cohesion, along with two indicators of programmatic coherence based on Twitter message content. Computing density and centrality statistics allow for the quantification of these two aspects in the party networks, while the nonparametric bootstrap introduces uncertainty of the account sampling process into the analysis. Our results suggest that smaller and newer parties, as well as the Social Democrats, tend to exhibit disproportionally high levels of organizational cohesion. At the same time, most parties show comparable—and also disproportionately low—levels of programmatic coherence compared to those displayed by the Social Democrats.

AbstractThis article analyses how political parties frame European integration, and gauges the consistency of their argumentation. Over the course of investigation, one can see how actors' positions are justified, and how the European Union is perceived (i.e., what forces give rise to Euroscepticism and Europeanism). It is argued here that the parties' framing of issues depends on the interests they traditionally defend at the national level, their general positions on European integration, and whether or not they belong to the established political actors in their respective countries. The coding approach enables the relation of frames to actors and positions, moving beyond the techniques employed by existing studies that analyse the media presentation of European integration. Sophisticated frame categorisations are provided to capture the complex structure of argumentation, going beyond a simple dichotomy of economic and cultural frames. Relying on a large and original media dataset covering the period 2004–2006, six Western European countries are investigated.

AbstractWe put forward a new approach to studying issue definition within the context of policy diffusion. Most studies of policy diffusion—which is the process by which policymaking in one government affects policymaking in other governments—have focused on policy adoptions. We shift the focus to an important but neglected aspect of this process: the issue‐definition stage. We use topic models to estimate how policies are framed during this stage and how these frames are predicted by prior policy adoptions. Focusing on smoking restriction in U.S. states, our analysis draws upon an original data set of over 52,000 paragraphs from newspapers covering 49 states between 1996 and 2013. We find that frames regarding the policy's concrete implications are predicted by prior adoptions in other states, whereas frames regarding its normative justifications are not. Our approach and findings open the way for a new perspective to studying policy diffusion in many different areas.

This is the first comprehensive overview of the waves of protest mobilization that spread across Europe in the wake of the Great Recession. Documenting the extent of these protests in a study covering thirty countries, including the issues they addressed and the degree to which they replicated each other, this book maps the prevalence and nature of protest across Europe, and explains the interactions between economic and political grievances that lead to protest mobilization. The authors assess a range of claims in the literature on political protest, arguing that they tend both to overstate the importance of anti-austerity sentiments and underestimate the relevance of political grievances in driving the protest. They also integrate a study of the electoral and protest arenas, revealing that electoral mass politics has been heavily influenced protest mobilization, which amplified electoral punishment at the polls.

Protest event analysis is a key method to study social movements, allowing to systematically analyze protest events over time and space. However, the manual coding of protest events is time-consuming and resource intensive. Recently, advances in automated approaches offer opportunities to code multiple sources and create large data sets that span many countries and years. However, too often the procedures used are not discussed in details and, therefore, researchers have a limited capacity to assess the validity and reliability of the data. In addition, many researchers highlighted biases associated with the study of protest events that are reported in the news. In this study, we ask how social scientists can build on electronic news databases and computational tools to create reliable PEA data that cover a large number of countries over a long period of time. We provide a detailed description our semiautomated approach and we offer an extensive discussion of potential biases associated with the study of protest events identified in international news sources.

How do economic grievances affect citizens' inclination to protest? Given rising levels of inequality and widespread economic hardship in the aftermath of the Great Recession, this question is crucial for political science: if adverse economic conditions depress citizens' engagement, as many contributions have argued, then the economic crisis may well feed into a crisis of democracy. However, the existing research on the link between economic grievances and political participation remains empirically inconclusive. It is argued in this article that this is due to two distinct shortcomings, which are effectively addressed by combining the strengths of political economy and social movement theories. Based on ESS and EU‐SILC data from 2006–2012, as well as newly collected data on political protest in 28 European countries, a novel, more fine‐grained conceptualisation of objective economic grievances considerably improves our understanding of the direct link between economic grievances and protest behaviour. While structural economic disadvantage (i.e., the level of grievances) unambiguously de‐mobilises individuals, the deterioration of economic prospects (i.e., a change in grievances) instead increases political activity. Revealing these two countervailing effects provides an important clarification that helps reconcile many seemingly conflicting findings in the existing literature. Second, the article shows that the level of political mobilisation substantially moderates this direct link between individual hardship and political activity. In a strongly mobilised environment, even structural economic disadvantage is no longer an impediment to political participation. There is a strong political message in this interacting factor: if the presence of organised and visible political action is a decisive signal for citizens that conditions the micro‐level link between economic grievances and protest, then democracy itself – that is, organised collective action – can help sustain political equality and prevent the vicious circle of democratic erosion.

Political mobilization in the electoral and protest arenas have long been studied as separate phenomena, following their own, independent dynamic. Parties and protests are rarely examined within the same framework, although the protest engagement of political parties is often assumed to be one of the main driving forces of the wave of protest in southern European countries, those most exposed to the economic crisis. The chapter provides the first large-scale study of protests sponsored by political parties across Europe before and after the Great Recession. It relies on a novel protest event dataset, collected by semi-automated content analysis of news agencies. The data cover protests in thirty countries, from 2000 to 2015. The results show the 'crowding out' of political parties as the driving force of the protest wave in southern Europe. We find the highest share of party sponsored protest in eastern Europe, where unlike in north-western and southern Europe, right-wing and non-mainstream parties are also active in protest. In line with the overall findings of the book, our results confirm the distinctive dynamic of protest in the three European macro-regions and put the link between social movements and the new challenger parties in perspective.