Escalating hostility between partisans threatens democratic governance and social cohesion by eroding trust and fuelling discriminatory behaviour towards opposing groups. This study investigates how people perceive the relations between different partisan groups and why certain pairs of partisans are viewed as friendlier or more hostile towards one another. Drawing on similarity-attraction theory in social psychology and research on affective polarization, I argue that citizens perceive the relationship as more friendly between individuals who support ideologically similar parties. The claim is empirically supported through the use of a novel survey item that assesses the likelihood of two partisans becoming good friends, across three multi-party democracies: Canada, Germany, and the UK. The findings suggest that the ideological proximity of parties not only shapes citizens’ perceptions of parties themselves but also influences their views of fellow citizens across party lines. By demonstrating that people consider party proximity and ideological alignment when evaluating inter-partisan relations, the study sheds light on how ideological and affective dimensions intertwine within these relationships in multi-party democracies.
During the first 2 years of the coronavirus pandemic, over 150 countries had scheduled elections, but approximately half of them had to be postponed due to the pandemic. Why were some elections postponed while others were not? Despite its impact on the election calendar and democratic accountability, election postponement has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. In this study, I investigate the conditions under which elections are more likely to be delayed. Utilizing a comprehensive cross-national dataset encompassing election schedules worldwide, COVID-19-related factors, and other societal and institutional characteristics, I provide the first systematic examination of election postponement during the first 2 years of the pandemic. The empirical analysis reveals that national elections are less likely to be postponed compared to second-order elections such as subnational and special elections. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the momentum of the pandemic plays a significant role, and effective pandemic management and robust healthcare infrastructures decrease the likelihood of election postponement. On the other hand, institutional constraints have little impact. By shedding light on the factors driving election postponement, this study enhances our understanding of how crises can shape democratic processes.
There are potentially multiple sources that make it difficult to compare the typical survey measure of the left-right self-placement cross-nationally. Among others, we focus on differential item functioning (DIF) due to the different use of response scales when the left-right is framed as an aggregate dimension of policies, and examine whether and to what extent the way ordinary citizens make use of the scale is cross-nationally comparable. Our goal is twofold. First, we assess the cross-national comparability of the left-right self-placement scale using the anchoring vignette method in nine European countries. Second, we propose a measure that quantifies the extent of DIF at the country level. The analyses of our original survey and other benchmark studies suggest that the size of cross-national DIF (CN-DIF) in the citizens’ use of left-right scale is relatively small when the left-right concept is considered in policy terms and the comparison is made among Western European countries.
When are voters more likely to project their own political position onto a candidate for office? We investigate this question by examining the assumed partisanship of a (self-declared) centrist politician, using data from a survey experiment fielded in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In doing so, we build on the social categorization model as well as recent U.S.-focused political science research on projection and ingroup/ outgroup racial divides—extending our analysis to incorporate racial and class similarities/differences across three countries where these divides likely vary in salience. We thus seek: (1) to contribute to research on the inferences citizens draw in nonpartisan elections and low-information contexts generally and (2) to highlight some potential methodological complications of using partisanship-less candidates in vignette experiments. Results suggest that even in the face of a self-declared centrist, voters from across the political spectrum tended to assume shared partisanship in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Examining projection by ingroup/outgroup divisions indicated that class appears to shape projection across all three countries, but that the racial divide only mattered in the United States. Finally, we also find evidence of counterprojection toward outgroup members—but once again only in the American context.
Building on studies on the political business cycle, the literature on welfare state retrenchment has argued that governments which cut the welfare state try to avoid blame by implementing painful measures in the beginning of the mandate and expanding benefits as elections approach. In contrast to this linear relationship, this article argues that governments often feel pressured to fulfil (mostly expansionary) campaign promises during the first months in office. Consequently, cutting right away is not what should be expected. Instead, a more nuanced, U-shaped timing trajectory is probable with a period in the beginning characterised by both cuts and fulfilment of expansionary pledges, followed by a period of cutbacks, and finally an expansive phase towards the end of a mandate. This argument is tested on our new original dataset of legislative changes in five European countries – Britain, Denmark, Finland, France and Germany – during the last four decades.
Are welfare state reforms electorally dangerous for governments? Political scientists have only recently begun to study this seemingly simple question, and existing work still suffers from two shortcomings. First, it has never tested the reform–vote link with data on actual legislative decisions for enough points in time to allow robust statistical tests. Secondly, it has failed to take into account the many expansionary reforms that have occurred in recent decades. Expansions often happen in the same years as cutbacks. By focusing only on cutbacks, estimates of the effects of reforms on government popularity become biased. This article addresses both shortcomings. The results show that voters punish governments for cutbacks, but also reward them for expansions, making so-called compensation, a viable blame-avoidance strategy. The study also finds that the size of punishments and rewards is roughly the same, suggesting that voters’ well-documented negativity bias does not directly translate into electoral behavior.
We use two original surveys (including survey experiments) conducted the week before the 2015 elections in the Britain and Denmark to explore the best method for measuring individuals’ knowledge of the partisan distribution of legislative seats in multi-party democracies. The complete lack of such questions in the corpus of survey research on multi-party democracies is a testament to the skepticism that many survey researchers have about the feasibility of such complex questions. However, our analysis, which is the first empirical test of this skepticism, reveals little evidence of respondents’ frustration or high levels of non-cooperation with these questions. Additionally, our survey experiments, which examine the usefulness of different question formats, make it clear that such questions should be framed in terms of the numbers of seats each party holds rather than shares or percentages of seats.
One of the core questions facing political scientists is how politicians are able to implement cutbacks without suffering electoral backlash. A possible explanation might be that the mass media refrain from reporting on welfare state reforms in a consistent way. In order to explore this, two unique datasets have been collected: one contains information on all policy reforms of British old age pensions and unemployment protection from 1996 to 2014, and the other contains hand- coded media articles that allow the tracking on a monthly basis of what reforms are picked up. It is found that the mass media report on cutbacks, but not on expansions, and that they prioritise easy-to-understand cutbacks over cutbacks that are more technical in nature.
This research explores voter preferences in the multi-dimensional policy space of the 2015 UK general election, as well as the influence of those preferences on vote choice. In our original pre-election survey, we apply a conjoint experimental design where we use actual party manifestos to examine voters' policy preferences across five main policy domains. This design allows us to both identify voters' sincere preferences, as estimated by their responses to hypothetical policy packages, and to reveal the influence of these preferences on voter support in the actual election. Our analysis reveals a considerable level of congruence between voters' underlying policy preferences and their vote choice in the 2015 election. Our results also speak to the previous literature on policy preferences and vote choice by demonstrating that voters not only weigh the importance of particular policy domains differently, but also have clear preferences regarding specific policy positions in a given domain, which eventually influence their support for a party in the election.
While political knowledge has been conceptually defined with two constructs – accuracy and confidence in factual information – conventional measurement of political knowledge has relied heavily on retrieval accuracy. Without measuring confidence-in-knowledge, it is not possible to rigorously identify different types of political informedness, such as misinformedness and uninformedness. This article theoretically explores the two constructs of knowledge and argues that each construct has unique antecedents and behavioral consequences. We suggest a survey instrument for confidence-in-knowledge and introduce a method to estimate latent traits of retrieval accuracy and confidence separately. Using our original survey that includes the measure of confidence-in-knowledge, we find that misinformed citizens are as engaged in politics as the well-informed, but their active involvement does not guarantee informed political choices. Our findings warrant further theoretical and empirical exploration of confidence in political knowledge.
A core, but so far untested, proposition of the new politics perspective, originally introduced by Paul Pierson, is that welfare state cutbacks will be implemented using so-called ‘invisible’ policy instruments, for example, a change in indexation rules. Expansion should, by implication, mainly happen using ‘visible’ policy instruments, for example, a change in nominal benefits. We have coded 1030 legislative reforms of old-age pensions and unemployment protection in Britain, Denmark, Finland and Germany from 1974 to 2014. With this unique data at hand, we find substantial support for this crucial new politics proposition.
“An Expanded Empirical Evaluation of Cross-National Comparability of Survey Measures of Political Interest Using Anchoring Vignettes: A Research Note” (with Nick Lin and Randy Stevenson). Electoral Studies 44: 423-428. 2016.
“Hvordan reagerer vælgerne på velfærdsforringelser?” (How Do Voters Respond to Welfare State Retrenchment?) (with Carsten Jensen, Christoph Arndt, and Georg Wenzelburger) Politica 48(3): 303-319. 2016. [ Media coverage at Altinget]
Making cross-groups comparisons by using survey instruments has raised substantial scholarly concerns due to the potential risk of incomparability resulting from differential item functioning (DIF). However, not every survey item necessarily suffers from DIF. In this paper, we argue that, unlike many other survey items (e.g., political efficacy), the usual question used to measure political interest is likely to be largely immune to DIF. Our theoretical argument centers on the relative specificity of the item and a corresponding cultural homogeneity (at least in advanced democracies) in what it means to be politically interested or not. Utilizing the anchoring vignettes technique (King et al., 2004; King and Wand, 2007) in our original surveys in the UK, France, and the Netherlands, we demonstrate the size of DIF is small for the standard political interest question.
Studies on retrospective voting argue that voters under presidentialism tend to assign co-responsibility for the president’s performance to her party in congressional elections. However, it is not uncommon for presidential parties to distance themselves from an unpopular president or for opposition parties to cooperate with a popular president. In doing so, parties can signal to voters that they side with a popular (or against an unpopular) president. Yet little is known about whether this strategic behavior has electoral payoffs. This study proposes a popularity-response model, where parties’ electoral outcomes are a product of how they respond to public opinion on the president. I hypothesize that parties defecting from an unpopular president (or cooperating with a popular president) minimize electoral losses and obtain a further electoral boost. Analysis using an original dataset coding issue congruence between presidents and parties prior to 35 elections in 18 Latin American countries supports this claim.
What is Left-Right in the Minds of Voters? (with Randy Stevenson and Philip Santoso), Book project, under contract with Cambridge University Press.
Paths to False Beliefs: Ignorance, Partisan Motivation, and Conspiracy Mentality (with David J. Hendry and Akitaka Matsuo)
The Misinformation Gender Gap and Its Consequences
How Voters Predict Coalition Bargaining Outcomes (with David Fortunato and Randy Stevenson)