Suchergebnisse

AbstractUnder which conditions does national parliamentary discourse politicise European Union (EU) policy evaluation? In times of multiple crises and uncertainty, the alleged 'democratic deficit' of the EU, defined as an apparent lack of legitimacy, has regained scholarly and popular attention. The European Commission and academic commentators consider policy evaluation a specialised and targeted tool to improve the 'output legitimacy' of the EU by assessing policy effectiveness and efficiency. While evaluation can strengthen output legitimacy directly via learning, evaluation can be particularly effective when it becomes part of the national communicative discourse on the EU. This discourse is most likely to take place in national parliaments, as they are the forums in which the government can be held to account. This paper relies on an automated content analysis of the share of keywords related to EU policy evaluation in debates in six national parliaments, covering a period of 20 years. The findings show that the combination of popular and party Euroscepticism is crucial in determining parliamentary debate on EU policy evaluation. Pro-European parties generally do not refer to policy evaluation. However, if political parties are critical of European integration, EU policy evaluation is mentioned more frequently. Under these conditions, members of parliaments also refer more frequently to EU policy evaluation as the public becomes more Eurosceptic. These findings suggest that EU policy evaluation is used as a tool for domestic political contestation, with potential negative normative implications for the output legitimacy of the EU and for evaluation as a tool for learning.

The role of national parliaments in scrutinising their governments in European Union affairs has been at the forefront of debates on democratic accountability in the European Union for the past two decades. Resolutions are the legislative instruments most clearly associated with government control. This article finds that party political strategies, and especially the different constraints and incentives for mainstream/government parties and issue entrepreneurs on Europe, are the most important factors determining the activity of national parliaments in the form of resolutions on European Union affairs. Issue entrepreneurs are parties which are Eurosceptic and for which Europe is salient. Motions initiated by issue entrepreneurs are numerous but limited to criticising the government and contain little technical detail, while the resolutions of mainstream government parties mostly support the government's position. Resolutions and motions in European Union affairs are thus used rather as instruments of 'position taking' than as a form of government control, but could still help to foster accountability by bringing European Union issues and government policy to the citizens' attention.

AbstractPolitical choice is central to citizens' participation in elections. Nonetheless, little is known about the individual‐level mechanisms that link political choice and turnout. It is argued in this article that turnout decisions are shaped not only by the differences between the parties (party polarisation), but also by the closeness of parties to citizens' own ideological position (congruence), and that congruence matters more in polarised systems where more is at stake. Analysing cross‐national survey data from 80 elections, it is found that both polarisation and congruence have a mobilising effect, but that polarisation moderates the effect of congruence on turnout. To further explore the causal effect of political choice, the arrival of a new radical right‐wing party in Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), is leveraged and the findings show that the presence of the AfD had a mobilising effect, especially for citizens with congruent views.

Of all atrocities committed by state actors in 20th century Europe, the systematic killings by Nazi Germany were arguably the most severe and best documented. While several studies have investigated the impact of the presence of concentration camps on surrounding communities in Germany and the occupied territories in terms of redistribution of wealth and property, the local-level impact on voting behaviour has not yet been explored. We investigated the impact of spatial proximity to a concentration camp between 1933 and 1945 on the likelihood of voting for far-right parties in the 2013 and 2017 federal elections. We find that proximity to a former concentration camp is associated with a higher vote share of such parties. A potential explanation for this finding could be a 'memory satiation effect', according to which voters who live in close proximity to former camps and are more frequently confronted with the past are more receptive to revisionist historical accounts questioning the centrality of the Holocaust in the German culture of remembrance.

Citizen satisfaction with democracy is greater when parties offer choices that are congruent with voter preferences. But are citizens content with simply having a party that represents their views or does their satisfaction depend on whether that party can also be instrumental in implementing policies? We argue that instrumentality moderates the effect of ideological congruence on democratic satisfaction. Combining an analysis of cross-national survey data with an experimental conjoint design, we find that citizens able to vote for a congruent party with a chance of entering government are more satisfied with democracy, whereas congruence without instrumentality has no such effect.

AbstractCitizen satisfaction with democracy is greater when parties offer choices that are congruent with voter preferences. But are citizens content with simply having a party that represents their views or does their satisfaction depend on whether that party can also be instrumental in implementing policies? We argue that instrumentality moderates the effect of ideological congruence on democratic satisfaction. Combining an analysis of cross‐national survey data with an experimental conjoint design, we find that citizens able to vote for a congruent party with a chance of entering government are more satisfied with democracy, whereas congruence without instrumentality has no such effect.