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Comparative political science has largely ignored the marked cross-national variation in Green party electoral performance. This article uses a unique aggregate dataset of 347 parliamentary elections from 32 countries over the course of 45 years to test competing theories about the causes of Green party success. The findings show that voter demand, institutions and mainstream party strategy all affect the Green vote. Green parties do well in societies with post-materialist conflicts caused by high levels of wealth or the presence of a tangible environmental dispute. The article also shows that regional decentralisation helps Green parties, but electoral systems have little effect on their vote share. Most importantly, it demonstrates that the impact of mainstream party strategy on Green electoral strength is dependent on the age of the Green party. While mainstream parties can undermine young Green parties by adopting the environmental issue, this effect is reversed once the Greens have survived a number of elections. Thus 'accommodative' mainstream party strategies eventually boost the Green vote by increasing the salience of the key Green issue.

The Eurozone crisis has altered the party political landscape across Europe. The most visible effect is the rise of challenger parties. The crisis not only caused economic hardship, but also placed considerable fiscal constraints upon a number of national governments. Many voters have reacted to this by turning their back on the traditional parties and opting instead for new, or reinvigorated, challenger parties that reject the mainstream consensus of austerity and European integration. This article argues that both sanctioning and selection mechanisms can help to explain this flight from the centre to challenger parties. First, voters who were economically adversely affected by the crisis punish mainstream parties both in government and in opposition by voting for challenger parties. Second, the choice of specific challenger party is shaped by preferences on three issues that directly flow from the Euro crisis: EU integration, austerity and immigration. Analysing both aggregate-level and individual-level survey data from all 17 Western EU member states, this article finds strong support for both propositions and shows how the crisis has reshaped the nature of party competition in Europe.

As an emerging federal system, the European Union (EU) divides decision-making powers between multiple levels of government. Yet little is known about how EU citizens attribute responsibility to the EU. In particular, do people hold the EU, rather than national governments, responsible for different policy outcomes, some of which are primarily decided at the EU level? This article investigates the extent to which institutional differences and individual biases influence citizens' attribution of responsibility in the EU. We rely on unique survey data collected in all 27 EU member states to explore how citizens attribute responsibility across five different policy areas. Using a multilevel model of responsibility judgments, our findings show that while citizens' evaluations correspond to the institutional context, group-serving biases, related to support for the EU, have a more important role in shaping attributions of responsibility in the EU.

This article investigates the extent to which economic ideology affects people's support for European Union integration and how this is conditioned by economic context. We argue that people on the economic left who live in a country with conditions of high income inequality and little state ownership will support European integration, because more integration would move public policy in a left-wing direction. By contrast, people on the left who live in a country with conditions of low income inequality and widespread public ownership are likely to be eurosceptic, as further integration would result in a more right-wing public policy. We empirically confirm our hypotheses and discuss the implications for European Union democracy.

This paper examines how ageing and generational formative experiences affect vote choices in Britain. Using a combination of panel data and assumptions about party fortunes we estimate ageing effects. These are then entered into a model using cross-sectional data from 1964 to 2010 to estimate generational differences in vote choice. Ageing increases the likelihood of a Conservative vote substantially, but there is no trend towards lower rates of Conservative voting among newer generations. There are however identifiable political generations corresponding with periods of Conservative dominance: voters who came of age in the 1930s, 1950s and 1980s are ceteris paribus somewhat more Conservative. Our method therefore lends some support to theories of political generations, but also demonstrates the considerable impact of ageing on vote choice.

In this paper we revisit the often disregarded 'pocketbook voting' thesis that suggests that people evaluate governments based on the state of their own finances. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey over the last 20 years, we measure changes in personal financial circumstances and show that the 'pocketbook voting' model works. Crucially, we also argue that the ability to attribute responsibility for these changes to the government matters. People respond much more strongly to changes in their own finances that are linked to government spending, such as welfare transfers, than to similar changes that are less clearly the responsibility of elected officials, such as lower personal earnings. We conclude that pocketbook voting is a real phenomenon, but that more attention should be paid to how people assign credit and blame for changes in their own economic circumstances.

A well-functioning democracy requires a degree of mutual respect and a willingness to talk across political divides. Yet numerous studies have shown that many electorates are polarized along partisan lines, with animosity towards the partisan out-group. This article further develops the idea of affective polarization, not by partisanship, but instead by identification with opinion-based groups. Examining social identities formed during Britain's 2016 referendum on European Union membership, the study uses surveys and experiments to measure the intensity of partisan and Brexit-related affective polarization. The results show that Brexit identities are prevalent, felt to be personally important and cut across traditional party lines. These identities generate affective polarization as intense as that of partisanship in terms of stereotyping, prejudice and various evaluative biases, convincingly demonstrating that affective polarization can emerge from identities beyond partisanship.

How do votes in direct democratic ballots translate into policy preferences about future outcomes and affect the perceived legitimacy of those outcomes? This article examines these questions in the context of sovereignty referendums: specifically, the 2016 referendum on British membership of the European Union (EU). While the referendum result gave the British government a mandate for Britain leaving the EU, it did not provide any firm guidance as to the kind of Brexit that voters would prefer and consider legitimate. To examine the perceived desirability and legitimacy of different Brexit outcomes, we conducted a nationally representative conjoint experiment measuring attitudes towards different possible negotiation outcomes. Our findings show that 'Leave' and 'Remain' voters were highly divided over what they wanted from Brexit on salient negotiation issues, but also that most voters did not regard any possible outcome as legitimate.

Conjoint analysis is a common tool for studying political preferences. The method disentangles patterns in respondents' favorability toward complex, multidimensional objects, such as candidates or policies. Most conjoints rely upon a fully randomized design to generate average marginal component effects (AMCEs). These measure the degree to which a given value of a conjoint profile feature increases, or decreases, respondents' support for the overall profile relative to a baseline, averaging across all respondents and other features. While the AMCE has a clear causal interpretation (about the effect of features), most published conjoint analyses also use AMCEs to describe levels of favorability. This often means comparing AMCEs among respondent subgroups. We show that using conditional AMCEs to describe the degree of subgroup agreement can be misleading as regression interactions are sensitive to the reference category used in the analysis. This leads to inferences about subgroup differences in preferences that have arbitrary sign, size, and significance. We demonstrate the problem using examples drawn from published articles and provide suggestions for improved reporting and interpretation using marginal means and an omnibus F-test. Given the accelerating use of these designs in political science, we offer advice for best practice in analysis and presentation of results.

This article argues that post-conflict consociational arrangements in ethnically divided societies incentivize moderation by political parties, but not policy differentiation outside the main conflict. This results in little policy-driven voting. Analysing party manifestos and voter survey data, we examine the evolution of party policy and cleavage voting under power-sharing in Northern Ireland 1998–2016. We find a reduction in ethno-national policy differences between parties and that ethno-nationalism has become less important in predicting vote choice for Protestants, but not Catholics. We also find little party differentiation in other policy areas and show that vote choices are largely independent of people's policy stances on economic or social issues. Our findings are thus largely consistent with a 'top-down' interpretation of political dynamics.