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AbstractA serious challenge facing Western democracies is the falling propensity of successive cohorts of citizens to vote. Over the last 50 years, newly eligible voters – particularly from poorer backgrounds – have become less likely to vote in their first elections, and more likely to develop habits of non‐voting. This trend has prompted greater interest in policies with the potential to increase first‐time voter turnout, such as lowering the voting age or compulsory political education. Despite a growing academic interest in volunteering as a means of youth political expression or route to civic revival, however, the promotion of youth volunteering has not been seriously considered as a potential tool to help address generational turnout decline.An extensive literature argues that volunteering can increase first‐time voter turnout, but it is hindered by the limited use of panel data and failure to account for confounding and selection effects. It has not, moreover, considered the potential for the effects of childhood volunteering to be conditional on prior political socialisation, particularly the influence of parents, which is necessary to assess its potential to reduce turnout gaps reflecting socio‐economic status. This study uses the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study and structural equation modelling to overcome these limitations and examine the impact of childhood volunteering on the turnout of newly eligible voters. It shows that for most young volunteers there is no significant benefit, but for the children of politically disengaged parents, volunteering does have a significant, positive effect.

AbstractWhat is the association between partisanship, individual views and behaviours towards the pandemic? This research note explores this question empirically using two datasets collected before and during the Covid‐19 pandemic: a daily survey covering nearly 100,000 individuals and county level mobility matched to UK 2019 general election results. At the individual level, our findings show that partisanship is strongly correlated with differences in both views and behaviours. Conservative voters were less likely to perceive Covid‐19 as dangerous and less likely to stay home during the national lockdown. At the county level, the effect of the national lockdown on mobility was negative and statistically significant only in less Conservative counties. Thus, partisanship is associated with different individual views and behaviours towards the pandemic even when there is broad consensus among the main political parties and the government about the nature of a public health problem and the appropriate policy response.

AbstractThis paper evaluates whether lobbying influence is open to the highest bidder or boosted by congruence with popular opinion. Common wisdom holds that well‐endowed organizations prevail in lobbying battles. This perception contrasts with recent observations, which point to the decisive role of public opinion. This paper unites these seemingly contrasting stances by arguing that both economic resources and congruence with public opinion are paramount for lobbying influence. What matters, we argue, is the interplay between the two. Lobby groups that already enjoy substantial economic capacities are expected to benefit most from congruence with public opinion. We test our expectations in the context of European Union policy making. We draw from a sample of 41 policy issues for which public opinion polls were conducted, an extensive content analysis of 2,085 news articles and 183 lobbyists' survey responses. We demonstrate that interest groups with more economic resources are generally more influential, but only if their policy positions are congruent with a public majority.

AbstractThough much research has focused on major political and humanitarian consequences of economic sanctions, little is known about how economic sanctions affect economic rights and freedoms in target countries. Often, sanctions work is divided into two main theoretical camps: direct economic effects and indirect human rights effects. These two bodies of work have significantly expanded our cumulative knowledge around economic coercion, but scholars in each camp primarily speak past one another while rarely drawing together the interrelated threads of direct and indirect sanctions effects. We challenge this common division by examining the extent to which economic sanctions imposed by the European Union, the United States or the United Nations affect labour rights practices. We posit that sanctions, as a direct shock to target economies, will prompt more labour rights violations at the workplace, such as arbitrary firings and the use of child or forced labour. We maintain that sanctions also undermine labour conditions via adverse indirect effects on human rights, civil society and bureaucratic capacity. Results from a time‐series cross‐national analysis lend strong support for the proposition that sanctions are significantly and directly related to worsened labour rights conditions. We further show that sanctions also indirectly contribute to labour rights violations through negative effects on human rights conditions and reduced bureaucratic capacity in target countries. Overall, our study deepens our understanding of the complicated outcomes of sanctions on individuals in target states and illustrates the need for further exploration into the interwoven effects of this popular policy tool.

AbstractA large strand of scholarly inquiry has built on the assumption that being active in legislatures helps further representatives' career prospects by enhancing their media and public visibility. Previous studies suggest some visibility‐boosting effects of parliamentary work, but results vary considerably across political settings and research designs. Moreover, there is little research on the extent to which the visibility‐boosting effect of being active in parliament varies across representatives. Specifically, do legislators with high news value benefit more from legislative speechmaking, or can other representatives make up for lower news value by taking the parliamentary floor? We believe that this lack of focus on the conditional nature of the link between political work and media visibility restricts our understanding of the consequences of political work. This study therefore presents a unique combination of data covering nearly 600,000 news appearances and 850,000 parliamentary speeches of members of parliament (MPs) in the United Kingdom (2000–2015) and Norway (2000–2016) to examine the link between legislative speechmaking and the news visibility of legislators. Our results suggest that the media appearances of representatives in the United Kingdom and Norway are associated positively with the number of legislative speeches representatives make and that this positive association between speechmaking and media visibility is differential across groups of representatives, with senior MPs and government party MPs benefiting more from being active on the parliamentary floor.

AbstractPolitical institutions and parties define the set of choices faced by voters, and structure the evolution of electoral preferences over the election cycle. While previous research examines the characteristics of institutions, here we consider the influence of political parties. We theorize ways in which they matter to the formation of electoral preferences over the election timeline, and also how these relate to institutional features. Our analysis simultaneously assesses the influence of different system‐ and party‐level variables on the dynamic structure of voters' preferences in legislative elections using a dataset of 27,357 vote intention polls in 26 countries since 1942, covering 231 discrete electoral cycles and encompassing 208 political parties. The results indicate that electoral institutions and parties are both important, but the characteristics of parties matter most of all, and effectively mediate institutional influences. These results have implications for the effects of election campaigns, the prediction of election outcomes, and party behavior itself.

The Covid-19 pandemic brought unprecedented governmental restrictions to personal and political freedoms. This article investigates individual-level differences in mass support for the restriction of civil liberties during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. Employing theories of affect and decision making, it assesses the extent to which different emotional reactions toward the pandemic influenced attitudes toward mobile phone surveillance and the implementation of curfews. We test our hypotheses in five advanced European democracies using panel data which allow us to identify the role of emotions in support for restrictive policies controlling for individual heterogeneity. The results suggest that experiencing fear about Covid-19 had a strong positive impact on supporting these measures, while hope and anger only played a minimal role. Importantly, the findings indicate that emotions moderate the impact of trust toward the government, a key variable for supporting the restriction of civil liberties during the pandemic. Specifically, experiencing fear was associated with higher acceptance of civil liberty restrictions. Further, experiencing fear substantially decreased the effect of trust in the government, rendering those who lack trust toward the government more supportive of civil liberty restrictions. These findings help us understand the psychological mechanisms that leads citizens to swiftly decide to sacrifice their civil liberties in the light of threat. Further, they offer empirical support for the causal role of affect in political decision-making.

Stigmatisation has been recognised as a major factor influencing the fortunes of populist radical right (PRR) parties. While scholars have examined it by taking parties as units of analysis, this study focuses on the individual level by asking Which PRR party members are more likely to feel stigmatised? After offering a novel theoretical explanation for feelings of stigmatisation based on the personal networks in which PRR grassroots members are embedded, it then investigates stigma using an original membership survey of about 7,000 members of the Sweden Democrats (SD) and interviews with 30 of them. The survey results show that the higher the educational qualification PRR grassroots members have achieved, the more likely they will feel stigmatised. In addition, those who have never had any relatives and/or friends in the SD, and those who are employed in the public sector, are more likely to consider membership discrediting. The interview data shed light on the survey results, by illustrating how public employees and university students find it hard to be open about their membership as they are surrounded by people with left-wing views. By contrast, having relatives and/or friends who are members of the party reduces the stigma of joining PRR parties, becoming active in them, and talking about politics in public. Along with countering some of the prevailing wisdom about stigmatisation in PRR parties, the findings contribute to our understanding of PRR grassroots membership, which has long been an overlooked topic in the literature.

Existing research mainly analyzes mass attitudes towards the European Union (EU) from the national and individual-level perspective. This paper adds to this literature by focusing on the relationship between EU support and subnational economic conditions, using harmonized survey data covering 40 years and 1.1 million respondents in 197 European regions. We first describe Europe's changing subnational conditions in terms of catch-up, wealthy, declining and glass-ceiling regions. The paper then develops and tests a set of hypotheses regarding the temporally dynamic relationship between EU attitudes and regions' long- and short-term economic conditions. Our analyses reveal important longitudinal variations in this relationship with low levels of geographic differentiation in public opinion giving way to clear spatial differences in recent years. Our findings are consistent with the idea that the Great Recession and Brexit have generated a new geography of both Euroscepticism in Europe's declining regions and EU support in its wealthy and catch-up regions.

Natural disasters can affect individuals' views about the environment, especially when these events are extreme and experienced by people directly (locally). In one of the first comprehensive and systematic attempts, we explore whether a similar relationship exists transnationally – a cross-border effect stemming from environmental disasters abroad on public opinion 'at home'. Spatial analyses present robust evidence that people's environmental salience attitudes are substantially driven by disaster-related deaths in nearby countries. It follows that environmental disasters cannot be treated as isolated incidents within state borders, but they rather have far-reaching, transnational consequences on public opinion and, potentially, policy. Accordingly, this research adds to our understanding of environmental politics, public opinion, natural disasters and diffusion effects.

Why have some territories performed better than others in the fight against COVID-19? This paper uses a novel dataset on excess mortality, trust and political polarization for 165 European regions to explore the role of social and political divisions in the remarkable regional differences in excess mortality during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we investigate whether regions characterized by a low social and political trust witnessed a higher excess mortality. Second, we argue that it is not only levels, but also polarization in trust among citizens – in particular, between government supporters and non-supporters – that matters for understanding why people in some regions have adopted more pro-healthy behaviour. Third, we explore the partisan make-up of regional parliaments and the relationship between political division – or what we refer to as 'uncooperative politics'. We hypothesize that the ideological positioning – in particular those that lean more populist – and ideological polarization among political parties is also linked to higher mortality. Accounting for a host of potential confounders, we find robust support that regions with lower levels of both social and political trust are associated with higher excess mortality, along with citizen polarization in institutional trust in some models. On the ideological make-up of regional parliaments, we find that, ceteris paribus, those that lean more 'tan' on the 'GAL-TAN' spectrum yielded higher excess mortality. Moreover, although we find limited evidence of elite polarization driving excess deaths on the left-right or GAL-TAN spectrums, partisan differences on the attitudes towards the European Union demonstrated significantly higher deaths, which we argue proxies for (anti)populism. Overall, we find that both lower citizen-level trust and populist elite-level ideological characteristics of regional parliaments are associated with higher excess mortality in European regions during the first wave of the pandemic.