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This is the final version. Available on open access from Oxford University Press via the DOI in this record ; Background. Vaccine hesitancy threatens public health. Some evidence suggests vaccine hesitancy in Europe may be linked with the success of populist parties, but more systematic analysis is needed. Methods. We examine the prevalence of individual level vaccine hesitancy across the EU and its association with political orientations. We also analyse whether success of populist parties is linked with vaccine hesitancy and uptake. We draw on individual-level Eurobarometer data from 2019, with a total of 27,524 respondents across the EU. We also rely on national and regional level populist party vote shares. Finally, for a timeseries analysis, we rely on aggregated populist party support as measured in the European Social Survey waves 1-9 (2002 to 2018), and national immunization coverage rates from the WHO from 2004-2018. Results. While vaccine hesitancy is confined to a minority of the population, this group is large enough to risk herd immunity. Political orientations on a left-right dimension are not strongly linked to vaccine hesitancy. Instead, vaccine hesitancy is associated with anti-elite world views and culturally closed rather than cosmopolitan positions. Conclusion. Vaccine hesitancy is not only present in all EU member states, but also maps on broader dimensions of cultural conflict. Hesitancy is rooted in a broader worldview, rather than misperceptions about health risks. Pro-vaccine interventions need to consider the underling worldview, rather than simply targeting misperceptions. ; British Academy ; European Union Horizon 2020

The present research investigates the extent of misinformation and conspiracy theories in radical right-wing populist parties (RRPPs) in light of the pandemic. As the Covid-19 emergency progressively gave way to an 'infodemic' within the EU's domestic political systems, RRPPs made regular use of misinformation as a political tool to build consensus and to polarise the public debate. This strategy is further maximised within the realm of social media, which disintermediates communication and allows political actors to directly reach their preferred audience with personalised content. Relying on an original dataset based on fact-checked statements from politicians, our study conducts a descriptive mapping of the discursive tactics employed by the League and Brothers of Italy within the Italian political scenario throughout 2020.

Earlier research links citizens' populist attitudes with the support for referendums. However, the foundations and meaning of this relationship remain unclear. This research note proposes a theoretical, conceptual and methodological discussion that identifies three main problems: studies linking populist attitudes with support for referendums have a rather narrow theoretical framing limited to populist studies, there is much ambiguity surrounding the role of direct democracy in the political system, and there is a tautology in studying the relationship between populist attitudes as measured through various indices and the preferences for direct democracy. Our goal is to discuss such problems and to propose several avenues to circumvent them. In particular, we believe that connecting to adjacent literatures beyond populist studies could be an important improvement. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

From SAGE Publishing via Jisc Publications Router ; History: received 2020-06-19, rev-recd 2021-01-15, accepted 2021-04-12, epub 2021-05-19 ; Publication status: Published ; Italy was the first European country to experience the impact of COVID-19. In order to deal with the health emergency, in early March 2020, the Italian government enforced strict lockdown measures. The different Italian police forces, the Polizia di Stato, Carabinieri and city police forces (Polizia Municipale), patrolled the streets, ensuring that people stayed at home and non-essential shops remained closed. These police forces received unprecedented support from the public in enforcing lockdown. People were active in their neighbourhoods, taking pictures of alleged violators and reporting them to the police, as well as posting pictures of those violating the rules on social networks. Local administrators encouraged citizens to report lockdown violations and in the case of Rome, introduced an online reporting system. This article focuses on the policing of lockdown in Italy. The article develops the argument that public attitudes, defined as policing from below, combined with policing from above by local administrators, produced a populist policing of the lockdown. Qualitative methodology is used to discuss interviews with police officers and analyse newspaper articles. Populist political forces are hegemonising in Italy, relying on the feelings of insecurity that the virus has embittered. Populist hegemony strongly influenced the policing of problems related to COVID. The lack of community policing or plural policing models within the organisation of Italian police forces, which remain a combination of continental and colonial models, has been decisive in the development of populist policing. The consequence of this is a type of 'policing on demand', with the public providing the police with intelligence and demanding enforcement.

Research has demonstrated that resentful emotions toward the politics and perceptions of being culturally and economically threatened by immigration increase support for populist parties in some European countries, and that macro-level economic conditions engender those perceptions and emotions and increase populist support. This article reveals that household-level economic conditions also affect perceptions of cultural and economic threat by immigrants. Low- and middle-income populations are more vulnerable to suffer economic distress due to macro-level factors such as import shock, which can increase their resentment toward democracy, and their perceptions that immigration is a cultural and economic threat, therefore increasing the likelihood to vote for populist parties. A mediation analysis using the European Social Survey data from 2002 to 2018 provides evidence for the argument.

La presente comunicación se centrará en el discurso de investidura de Pedro Sánchez (PSOE), actual presidente de gobierno español, y el debate en torno a este discurso, al iniciarse el Segundo Gobierno Sánchez. Este gobierno tiene la particularidad de ser el primer gobierno nacional de coalición en la democracia española moderna. Por ende, este discurso es histórico y que, al tratarse de un gobierno de coalición, el presidente de gobierno lidera por primera vez en la historia reciente un gobierno que incluye otros partidos que el suyo y tiene que (re)presentar no solo a su partido sino también a la coalición entera en su discurso de investidura. Esta comunicación propondrá un análisis discursivo de cómo tanto el candidato a la presidencia del gobierno como los diputados construyen esta coalición respectivamente en el discurso de la investidura y el debate que lo sigue. Por un lado, se mostrará cómo Pedro Sánchez construye la coalición como una coalición progresista, apoyándose tanto en el número de votos como en la larga historia del PSOE para subrayar la legitimidad de la coalición y de su candidatura a la presidencia del gobierno. Se analizará además cómo construye la imagen de una coalición unida, lo que requiere especial esfuerzo tras las elecciones anteriores en las cuales los mismos partidos no llegaron a formar una coalición. Por otro lado, se analizará cómo representantes de los demás partidos bien apoyan la coalición retomando la calificación de progresista bien la atacan. En el último caso, se tilda a menudo la coalición de populista y, en menor medida, de nacionalista, separatista o comunista. Mediante esta construcción discursiva, que se apoya a menudo en la coordinación de varios adjetivos calificativos, se intenta descalificar la coalición – y la decisión del PSOE de liderarla – centrándose más bien en otros partidos de la coalición que el PSOE. Este análisis mostrará entonces cómo los discursos en torno a la coalición en el gobierno nacional, una realidad nueva para la España contemporánea, procuran contribuir a representarla como legítima o, al contrario, intentan atacarla enfatizando su carácter múltiple y enfocándose en miembros específicos.

Institutional and political distrust are often associated with the improved electoral performance of extremist parties. This study analyses to what extent political distrust and Euroscepticism are associated with extreme left and right ideological positions. We specifically examine voters in the Netherlands – a country with wide array of political parties spanning a broad ideological spectrum. The study utilises probability samples from the Dutch National Election Survey and the European Election Studies, as well as opt-in samples collected through Vote Advice Applications (VAAs), amounting to a total of 20,548 analysed respondents. By employing hierarchical regression analyses, we find that across multiple elections at the national and European level, both radical left and radical right respondents are more prone to be politically distrustful and Eurosceptic, than respondents who profess a centrist political ideology. In addition, our analyses suggest that distrust and Euroscepticism can be explained by respondents' party preference.

Published in "Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Location Based Services (LBS 2021)", edited by Anahid Basiri, Georg Gartner and Haosheng Huang, LBS 2021, 24-25 November 2021, Glasgow, UK/online. ; Surveys have been one of the traditional tools to collect public opinions. However, social media are an important alternative to surveys, being a source of information easily available, in high volume and at low cost. There is plenty of literature dealing with the study of different social, political or environmental topics through social media such as Twitter. Climate change is one of these topics and has major relevance in our current society. In addition, politics is a common element of analysis in the platform. Nevertheless, there is not enough insight about the overall quantitative relevance of climate change compared with other topics such as politicians. Moreover, some of the literature focus specifically on geolocated tweets, which are a small fraction of the total posts generated. This work in progress deals with the identification and semantic analysis of geolocated posts in social media. We analyse and compare the presence of climate change with populist politicians in the platform. These political figures often have a controversial stance on climate change while enacting policies affecting millions of citizens. We aim to study how suitable is the platform for spatiotemporal analysis of public opinion on climate change, and how relevant is the topic on it compared to the presence of some populists. We also aim to provide guidance for further research based on geolocated tweets by estimating how much geolocated data is produced by which countries. More than 170 M geolocated tweets were extracted and analysed. Those tweets containing terms related to climate change in the official languages of the 14 most popular countries in the dataset, as well as the names of several politicians were filtered. Then, an analysis was performed to characterise the spatial and temporal global distribution of these posts during most of the past decade. This was compared with the dates of major events related with climate change and politics. Additionally, sentiment analysis was used to characterise the polarity of the posts. This paper presents an estimation of the relative presence of climate change in Twitter based on probably one of the largest geolocated tweets datasets existing. ; 155 ; 163 ; 9