Suchergebnisse

A number of studies on political representation focus on the comparative assessments of citizen ideological congruence. But this literature has largely overlooked an important topic: the representation of social groups. While present studies of congruence investigate whether some countries perform better than others in terms of the levels of median citizen congruence, they cannot say much about the extent to which political elites give adequate concern to every group of citizens in the representative process. In this paper I introduce the concept and measure of inequality in congruence and demonstrate its properties by comparing gender groups. I also ask whether virtues of proportional electoral arrangements endure when we consider group differences in ideological representation. Empirical tests that were conducted on data from 88 legislative elections in 33 countries strongly suggest that gender inequality in congruence is in fact considerably smaller in countries with majoritarian arrangements.

This chapter focusses on age differences in partisanship and party–voter congruence, explains whether those parties that manage to get young people to vote, and with whom the young identify, can articulate and aggregate their supporters' preferences. The analysis shows that while the young are less likely to identify with political parties compared to older citizens, more than half of young voters report to be close to political parties. There are no large differences in party–voter policy agreement among the selected age groups. There is no evidence to suggest that young voters are less represented by their preferred parties compared to other age groups; in fact, overall levels of policy representation for all citizens are quite satisfactory. In addition, we were interested in identifying whether different parties perform better with respect to two age groups. The findings suggest that niche parties, and ideologically distinctive parties attract more young partisans, but also that parties successfully balance heterogeneous requests from different age groups, and they all perform their representative roles quite well.

This article explores the subject matter of new political parties' survival by analysing the recent trajectory of the Green party ORaH in Croatia. ORaH emerged in October 2013; it won 9.4 percent of the vote at the 2014 European Parliament election and subsequently rose to 18.5 percent of public support in October 2014, only to collapse to 1.7 percent of the vote at the parliamentary election held in November 2015. In order to explain ORaH's initial meteoric rise and its later equally rapid demise, we will employ studies on new and niche parties while we further elaborate our analysis of ORaH's programme by profiling ORaH's voter base. We also address a recurrent weakness in political party research by analysing the role of the European level of competition in increasing the chances of a new party's survival by developing a framework that better integrates domestic and international dynamics of political party development. Our main finding is that despite its success in the 2014 European Parliament elections, and even though its electorate shares important features of the European Green voter, ORaH failed to secure parliamentary representation because of the inability of the party's leadership to steer the party away from its initial contender status and define OraH's policy niche.

Recent scholarship offers compelling evidence on the negative impact of income inequality on satisfaction with democracy. This article studies whether the impact of inequality on evaluations of the democratic process varies for different groups in the population and over time. The central argument is that the impact of inequality is conditional on individual characteristics and experience. Young adults and members of the 1990s generation should be more sensitive to income inequality compared to older generations. To answer this question, we use cumulative six-wave data from the European Social Survey (2002-2012), matched with income inequality estimates from the Standardized World Income Inequality Dataset (2014). Results from a series of mixed-effects models reveal that higher levels of income inequality are associated with lower levels of satisfaction with democracy, but with a disproportionate negative influence on young adults compared to older citizens and also on the 1990s cohort compared to all other cohorts.

'Disobedient Democracy: A Comparative Analysis of Contentious Politics in the European Semi-periphery' is a research project implemented by the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Zagreb, in the period 2016-2021, led by Principal Investigator Danijela Dolenec and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (IZ11Z0_166540 – PROMYS). The overall objective of the project is to explore how protest politics advances democracy by collecting and analyzing data on protest mobilizations in four countries: Portugal, Spain, Croatia and Serbia.‎