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Electoral 'winners' (i.e., voters casting a ballot for a party included in the post-electoral government) are acknowledged to be more satisfied with democracy than supporters of opposition parties. However, little is known about the influence of parties and their specifics on the boost in satisfaction with democracy experienced by their voters. To address this question, the research utilizes 17 surveys from 12 countries included in the European Social Survey rounds 1–8, for which a government replacement took place during the survey period. This allows this research to employ discontinuity design and examine the effect of two attributes related to parties—differences in party vote shares, and voters' feeling of closeness to a party. The findings suggest that these factors have a negligible influence on voters' satisfaction with democracy and only scant evidence is found that closeness to a party tends to increase their satisfaction. When voters' attitudes from before and after a government replacement are compared, changes in government do not seem to strike voters as a surprise and thus they do not cause any sudden and lasting changes in the general attitudes of electorates. Nevertheless, this indicates a novel contribution to the literature: the effect of losing needs some time to fully develop until it results in a decrease in satisfaction level. Based on these findings, the research concludes that when it comes to parties' characteristics, it is primarily the government/opposition status which determines voters' degree of satisfaction with democracy.

Electoral 'winners' (i.e., voters casting a ballot for a party included in the post-electoral government) are acknowledged to be more satisfied with democracy than supporters of opposition parties. However, little is known about the influence of parties and their specifics on the boost in satisfaction with democracy experienced by their voters. To address this question, the research utilizes 17 surveys from 12 countries included in the European Social Survey rounds 1–8, for which a government replacement took place during the survey period. This allows this research to employ discontinuity design and examine the effect of two attributes related to parties—differences in party vote shares, and voters' feeling of closeness to a party. The findings suggest that these factors have a negligible influence on voters' satisfaction with democracy and only scant evidence is found that closeness to a party tends to increase their satisfaction. When voters' attitudes from before and after a government replacement are compared, changes in government do not seem to strike voters as a surprise and thus they do not cause any sudden and lasting changes in the general attitudes of electorates. Nevertheless, this indicates a novel contribution to the literature: the effect of losing needs some time to fully develop until it results in a decrease in satisfaction level. Based on these findings, the research concludes that when it comes to parties' characteristics, it is primarily the government/opposition status which determines voters' degree of satisfaction with democracy.

AbstractParties can not onlyactivelyadjust the electoral rules to reach more favourable outcomes, as is most often recognized in political science, but they alsopassivelycreate an environment that systematically influences electoral competition. This link is theorized and included in the wider framework capturing the mutual dependence of electoral systems and party systems. The impact of passive influence is successfully tested on one out of two factors closely related to party systems: choice set size (i.e., number of options provided to voters) and degree of ideological polarization. The research utilizes established datasets (i.e., Constituency-Level Elections Archive, Party System Polarization Index, Chapel Hill Expert Survey, and Manifesto Project Database) and via regression analysis with clustered robust standard errors concludes that the choice set size constitutes an attribute with passive influence over electoral systems. Thus, it must be reflected when outcomes of electoral systems are estimated or compared across various contexts.

LeDuc, Lawrence; Niemi, Richard G.; Norris, Pippa (Eds.) (2014). Comparing Democracies 4: Elections and Voting in a Changing World. London: Sage, 247 pages.

Bowler, Shaun and Donovan, Todd (2013). The Limit of Electoral Reform. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 164 pages.

This study is focused on the democratic competencies and political participation of young people taking part in debate programs in seven "new" democracies – the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, and Slovakia. The research employs conventional methods adopted from various established surveys for capturing the political attitudes and values of youths. Using a longitudinal research design, we compare results from debaters and their non-debating peers on three dimensions: political competence, democratic values, and political participation. The results of the pre-tests indicate that debaters' attitudes are more in accordance with what a democratic theory would expect from active and engaged citizens. Participating in debate activities did not reveal significant attitudinal improvements during the short timeframe of our research (one school year), but the initial differences between debaters and non-debaters remained stable over time.

Chapter 1: Political parties, state resources and electoral clientelism -- Chapter 2: Clientelism and distributive politics in Australia: comparing partisan pork barrel with contingency-based vote-buying -- Chapter 3: Administrative clientelism and policy reform failure: the Western Canada Integrated Land Management experience 1990–2015 -- Chapter 4: Authoritarian clientelism: the case of the president's 'creatures' in Cameroon -- Chapter 5: Coordinating the machine: subnational political context and the effectiveness of machine politics -- Chapter 6: Political parties and clientelism in transition countries: evidence from Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine -- Chapter 7: Does clientelism hinder progressive social policy in Latin America? -- Chapter 8: Conclusion.

Intro -- Contents -- Political parties, state resources and electoral clientelism -- Abstract -- Introduction -- Emergence of electoral clientelism and some of its forms -- Studying electoral clientelism -- Contributions and content of this special issue -- References -- Clientelism and distributive politics in Australia: comparing partisan pork barrel with contingency-based vote-buying -- Abstract -- Introduction -- Clientelism: the commitment problem in a contingency model of distributive politics -- Clientelism: core vs. swing voters and the commitment problem -- Australian Parliamentary pork barrel: marginal seats and partisan control in a non-contingency model of distributive politics -- Parliamentary pork barrel: partisan power and vertical control -- Partisan pork barrel: limits and constraints -- Summary: clientelism v. partisan pork barrel politics -- Data and methods -- Analysis and discussion -- Labor sports grants -- Coalition regional partnerships program grants -- Conclusion -- References -- Administrative clientelism and policy reform failure: the Western Canada Integrated Land Management experience 1990-2015 -- Abstract -- Introduction: clientelism and the challenges of policy integration -- Integrated resource management strategies as policy reforms: a brief overview -- The problem of (un) Integrated Land Management in Canada -- Efforts to promote integrated resource policies in Western Canada 1990-2015: four case studies -- British Columbia -- Alberta -- Saskatchewan -- Manitoba -- Analysis: the role of administrative clientelism in policy-making: lessons from the ILM reform experience -- Conclusion: the challenges to integration posed by administrative clientelism -- References -- Authoritarian clientelism: the case of the president's 'creatures' in Cameroon -- Abstract -- Introduction -- Theory and argument -- Research design.

Abstract
What shapes citizens' perceptions of long-term welfare state sustainability? Past work hints at three explanations: information about fiscal pressure, deservingness views of recipient groups, and left-right ideology. We consider all three in an experiment exposing people to information about fiscal costs and/or low deservingness in the labor market domain. Left-right ideology functions as a moderator. Unlike past work, which has concentrated on demographic pressures, information about fiscal costs does not generate worries about sustainability (separately or combined with deservingness cues). Rather, left-right ideology moderates reactions. People on the left seem to question and counterargue against fiscal pressure, such that when facing negative information, they develop more positive sustainability views. This counter-reaction coexists with statistically insignificant effects in the negative direction among people on the right. These ideological contingencies arise without partisan cues, suggesting that welfare state pressure itself is ideologically controversial in the labor market domain.

AbstractPostal voting intends to provide citizens residing abroad with a convenient voting technique to influence political representation in their country of origin. However, its adoption among individuals is dependent on two opposing factors. On the one hand, voting via post helps to overcome the increasingdistancebetween a voter's residency abroad and the nearest polling station organized by a diplomatic mission (mostly at an embassy or a consulate). On the other hand, this way of voting also requires enoughtrustthat the postal service and designated state office will successfully deliver one's vote to the ballot box because the result cannot be effectively verified without violation of the ballot secrecy. We examine the interaction of these two factors in an originally conducted survey among Finnish citizens residing abroad fielded shortly after the 2019 Parliamentary elections—the first occasion after Finland put postal voting into effect. Altogether, 664 respondents responded to all questions required for our specification of binomial logistic regression models controlling for various potential confounders. The results demonstrate that trust in postal voting moderates the impact of distance on one's probability to adopt postal voting. While low-trusting emigrant voters remain largely indifferent regardless of the distance to the nearest polling station, medium-trusting non-resident citizens increasingly mail their ballots when the nearest polling station is more than 100 km away. High-trusting individuals begin to increasingly do so when they are ten to 30 km away.

Popular consent is an essential element for success and stability of democracies. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that "electoral winners" (i.e. voters casting a ballot for government parties) are more satisfied with democracy than supporters of the opposition parties. However, little is known about the dynamics of satisfaction during the electoral cycle: Do winners become happier and losers even more discontent over time? We approach this question by utilizing an interview date in the European Social Survey (rounds 1–8) to position individuals within the different stages of electoral cycle. The results based on 199,207 responses from 199 surveys in 31 countries suggest that satisfaction with democracy stays relatively stable during the electoral cycle across various electoral systems if the political development is predictable. However, if actions of the parties are uncertain, namely the alternations of governments tend to be frequent, partial, and opened to all parties, and hence neither winners nor losers know how steady their status is with respect to the political development in the country, their satisfaction tend to fluctuate over time. Therefore, the conclusion reached is the more stable West European democracies have limited generalizability to the low-predictable systems in Central and Eastern Europe.

This study connects two apparently disparate fields of inquiry in a specific quantitative way. In Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy, the majoritarian–consensual "executives–parties" score ( L) combines five indices. Four of these largely or entirely derive from factors that Shugart and Taagepera, Votes from Seats, logically deduced from the product of two numbers: the number of seats in an average electoral district ( M) and in the first or only chamber of representative assembly ( S). Hence L connects to the purely institutional seat product MS (logged) along a simple logistic pattern. It can be predicted from [Formula: see text], with R2 = 0.59. Thus, surprisingly, the majoritarian–consensual typology largely stems from the number of seats available.