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Since the end of the Cold War, the EU aims to advance to a relevant and autonomous actor in international politics—especially concerning security and defense politics. Scholars interested in whether the EU member states actually converge in their security and defense preferences often analyze strategy papers qualitatively, focusing on selected countries at specific points in time. In this article, we propose a dictionary approach for analyzing the development of security and defense preferences within the EU over the last three decades using quantitative text analysis. We make use of 163 strategy papers, published by all EU member states and the EU itself since 1994. The findings show that EU member states react similarly to international events, but do not converge substantially in their preferences. Furthermore, there is no substantial convergence to the position of the EU itself. We finally discuss usefulness and validity of quantitative text analysis in comparative research more broadly.

AbstractDemocracies without democrats are not sustainable. Yet, recent studies have argued that Western citizens are turning their backs on the system of self-governance, thereby eroding the societal foundations of consolidated democracies. This study contributes to discussions about citizen support of democracy by (1) analyzing new cross-national survey data in 18 European countries that facilitate assessments of the temporal and geographical generalizability of previous findings, (2) disentangling age, cohort and period effects, thereby aligning the analytical methods with the theoretical arguments and (3) transparently reporting all evidence derived from pre-registered analyses to avoid cherry-picked findings. The findings show that citizens of consolidated democracies continue to endorse self-governance. Yet in some (but not all) countries, there is evidence of a growing number of 'democrats in name only', particularly among the young generation. These findings suggest a second phase in research on democratic fatigue that broadens the analytical scope for the multi-faceted nature of democratic support.

A stable democratic society is unthinkable if its citizens oppose the principles of self-governance. Yet, recent studies suggest that citizens of consolidated democracies increasingly turn their backs on this system of government. Nonetheless, the evidence is mixed and mainly focuses on attitudes toward democracy as a generic concept, while less is known about mass support for the liberal variant of democracy. This study contributes to this debate by 1) analyzing citizen attitudes toward core elements of liberal democracy in addition to direct measures of democratic support and 2) separating age, period, and cohort effects. We investigated the development of democracy-related attitudes in probability-based samples collected in Germany from 1982 through 2018. Although Germany's Eastern region can be considered a likely case of democratic deconsolidation, the analysis did not provide evidence for a decline in support of democracy as a generic concept or its fundamental principles in West or East Germany.

Democracies without democrats are not sustainable. Yet, recent studies argue that Western citizens are turning their backs on the system of self-governance, thereby eroding the societal foundations of consolidated democracies. We contribute to discussions about citizen support of democracy by 1) analyzing new cross-national survey data in 18 European countries that enable assessing the temporal and geographical generalizability of previous findings; 2) disentangling age-, cohort-, and period effects, thereby aligning the analytical methods with the theoretical arguments; 3) transparently reporting the entire evidence derived from pre-registered analyses to avoid cherrypicked findings. Our findings show that citizens of consolidated democracies continue to endorse self-governance. Yet, in some but not all countries, there is evidence for a growing number of 'democrats in name only', particularly among the young generation. These findings suggest a second phase in research on democratic fatigue that broadens the analytical scope for the multi-faceted nature of democratic support.

A stable democratic society is unthinkable if its citizens oppose the principles of self-governance. Yet, recent studies suggest that citizens of consolidated democracies increasingly turn their backs on this system of government. Nonetheless, the evidence is mixed and mainly focuses on attitudes toward democracy as a generic concept, while less is known about mass support for the liberal variant of democracy. This study contributes to this debate by 1) analyzing citizen attitudes toward core elements of liberal democracy in addition to direct measures of democratic support and 2) separating age, period, and cohort effects. We investigated the development of democracy-related attitudes in probability-based samples collected in Germany from 1982 through 2018. Although Germany's Eastern region can be considered a likely case of democratic deconsolidation, the analysis did not provide evidence for a decline in support of democracy as a generic concept or its fundamental principles in West or East Germany.

Cover -- 1. Introduction -- 1.1 Perspectives on voting behavior in the 2009 and 2013 elections -- 1.2 Theoretical framework, model, and expectations -- 1.3 Data and methodology -- 1.4 Plan of the book -- 2. How voters perceived the campaigns -- 2.1 Introduction -- 2.2 Exposure to campaign communication -- 2.3 Selectivity of campaign exposure -- 2.4 Evaluations of campaign stimuli and their selectivity -- 2.5 Conclusion -- 3. The campaign dynamics of participatory and partisan attitudes -- 3.1 Introduction -- 3.2 Participatory attitudes -- 3.3 Partisan attitudes -- 3.3.1 Introduction -- 3.3.2 Issue attitudes -- 3.3.3 Evaluations of government performance -- 3.3.4 Candidate attitudes -- 3.3.5 Coalition preferences -- 3.4 Conclusion -- 4. The campaign dynamics of turnout and party choice -- 4.1 Introduction -- 4.2 Turnout -- 4.3 Vote choice -- 4.4 Conclusion -- 5. Campaign effects on turnout at the individual level -- 5.1 Introduction -- 5.2 Methodology -- 5.3 Effects of campaign communication and participatory attitudes on turnout -- 5.4 Conclusion -- 6. Campaign effects on party choice at the individual level -- 6.1 Introduction -- 6.2 Model, expectations, and analytical strategy -- 6.2.1 Model and expectations -- 6.2.2 Analytical strategy -- 6.3 Effects of partisan attitudes on vote choice -- 6.4 Effects of campaign stimuli on vote choice -- 6.5 Conclusion -- 7. Conclusion -- References -- Appendix A: Question wording and construction of variables -- Political behavior -- Predispositions -- Participatory and partisan attitudes -- Communication and campaign stimuli -- Variables that capture campaign trajectories of turnout: -- Variables that capture campaign trajectories of party choice: -- Appendix B: Treatment of missing data by design for the fixed effects-models in Chapters 5 and 6 -- Appendix C: Additional tables

Populist discourse—which tends to benefit anti-systemic parties—has been on the rise in the world's democratic states. Powerful non-democratic states have both the means and the incentive to spread such discourse to democratic states. We clarify the incentives illiberal states have to produce such communication, and delineate how this type of political communication fuses traditional state-to-state propaganda with election interventions. We draw on the case of Kremlin-sponsored communication on the issue of refugees in Germany to illustrate the mechanisms through which the discourse operates in target countries. We create a corpus of over a million news stories to identify the prevalence of illiberal discourse and its timing relative to Germany's elections. We show that the Kremlin intervened in the 2017 federal elections by promoting refugee stories over and above the rate at which German outlets did. We discuss the broader implications for the use of directed political communication as a form of election intervention.