Suchergebnisse

The study seeks to explore antipartyism in Western Europe. Particularly, it focuses on the extent to which the young adults differ from their elders in terms of trust in parties in fourteen West European countries. Pooled data, based on the European Social Survey 2006/2007, is employed and analyzed by means of ordinary least squares multiple regression. The other socio-economic background variables of the model, as well as the political background, interpersonal trust and the country of origin, are controlled in order to isolate the effect of age. The analysis shows that trust in parties of 18–30 year olds is, on average, significantly higher than in the rest of the population which contradicts the assumptions of the post-modernization theory and the empirical fact that electoral participation among West European young adults is constantly decreasing. Thus, the article suggests that antipartyism and political participation should be seen as distinct processes at different birth cohorts and perhaps also at different stages of the lifecycle.

While previous research has generally shown that economic performance is an important predictor of satisfaction with democracy, differences between political systems on the majoritarian-consensual dimension have not been as marked as expected. What has been neglected in previous studies is how the interaction between economic performance and type of power-sharing arrangement co-produce democratic satisfaction. This study uses multiple rounds of data from the European Social Survey between 2002 and 2013 involving 31 countries. The results show that short-term changes in economic performance and government fractionalization interactively increase or decrease levels of political support. The effect of economic performance on satisfaction with democracy becomes weaker the more fractionalized a government is. Satisfaction with how democracy works in a country remains relatively high in systems with fractionalized coalition governments when the economy is performing poorly. But when the economy performs extraordinarily well, satisfaction with democracy is even higher in countries with a dominant party in charge of government power.

Several scholars agree that low political trust has fundamental negative implications for society at large. This study tests the power of institutional performance theory in explaining the differences between individuals in political trust (cross‐sectional) and fluctuations of political trust over time (longitudinal). Indeed, the dominant scholarly debate has concerned whether political trust is stable and dependent of endogenous factors such as political socialization and social trust, or whether it is exogenous (i.e., in constant fluctuation due to later experiences with institutions and the outputs they produce). In terms of cross‐sectional differences, the aim is to assess the relative impact institutional performance on political trust of a citizen. As regards the longitudinal approach, political trust varies over time and from an explanatory perspective it is important also to understand how well the institutional performance theory predicts over‐time variation of political trust. The study employs repeated European Social Survey data for Finland between 2004 and 2013. The results show, first and foremost, the strong impact of evaluations of institutional performance on political trust: satisfaction with government and economy explains differences both between individuals and over time. Social trust and welfare state performance are also strong predictors, but they explain differences only at the individual level and do not predict over‐time variations.

In this study we explore to what extent did anti-political-establishment voting mobilized manifest political distrust in the 2011 Finnish parliamentary elections. In particular, we seek to determine whether the channels of manifest political distrust vary for different forms of political trust. Individual-level data from the Finnish National Election Study (FNES 2011, N = 1,268) is analyzed by applying multinomial logistic regressions. The results show that antipolitical-establishment voting effectively channels both specific and diffuse political distrust, but this dissatisfaction is not reflected as anti-incumbency voting. Furthermore, it seems that a significant amount of latent political distrust, which is not explicitly expressed by party preference at electoral polls, exists in the electorates of several governmental and opposition parties.

What populist right parties offer (the supply side) should be examined in relation to the preferences of the populist right electorate (the demand side). This article examines how the supply and demand in the electoral market are met by assessing the relative importance of party, party leader, and district-level candidate for the right-wing populist vote. The study is set in an electoral system, which uses preferential voting for candidates in multi-member districts, namely Finland, where all three objects of vote choice may matter. We analyse post-election survey data for the 2011 parliamentary election in which the right-wing populist True Finns party gained almost one fifth of the national vote. The results show that being guided by the characteristics of the party leader is a much stronger predictor the of the True Finns vote than being affected by party or district-level candidate characteristics.