How much do electoral institutions matter for the rise of populist parties? Evidence on this question is mixed, with some scholars arguing that the role of electoral rules is small. We provide new evidence for the impact of electoral system change. The UK's adoption of a proportional electoral system for European elections in 1999 provides a unique opportunity to study the link between electoral rules and the ascendancy of right-wing populist parties. Employing both synthetic control and difference-in-difference methods, we estimate that the electoral reform increased the vote share of right-wing populists by about 12 to 13.5 percentage points on average. During a time when populism was rising across Europe, the reform abruptly shifted populist votes in the UK above the European trend and above more plausible comparison cases. Our results also imply that caution is needed when empirical results based on partial reforms are extrapolated to electoral system change.

This article contributes to normative debates about residential segregation and its relationship to inequality. It defends a position often disregarded in literature: that there is merit to advancing residential integration through some scenarios where advantaged individuals move to disadvantaged areas. It develops this case in dialogue with three other views. In relation to advocates of addressing the inequalities of residential segregation through redistribution, it defends integration as a means of tackling social and political factors that sustain injustice. It challenges those who defend relocating disadvantaged individuals to advantaged areas by highlighting the burdens and demand for cultural assimilation this imposes on the disadvantaged. It considers the worry that advantaged individuals relocating to disadvantaged areas harbours the problematic features of gentrification. It responds that these concerns, while important in some cases, do not arise in all scenarios of this kind.

International solidarity is indispensable for coping with global crises; however, solidarity is frequently constrained by public opinion. Past research has examined who, on the donor side, is willing to support European and international aid. However, we know less about who, on the recipient side, is perceived to deserve solidarity. The article argues that potential donors consider situational circumstances and those relational features that link them to the recipients. Using factorial survey experiments, we analyse public support for international medical and financial aid in Germany during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results show that recipient countries' situational need and control, as well as political community criteria, namely, group membership, adherence to shared values and reciprocity, played a crucial role in explaining public support for aid. Important policy implications result: on the donor side, fault-attribution frames matter; on the recipient side, honouring community norms is key to receiving aid.

This letter studies the impact of past violence and repression on current territorial preferences in a contemporary democracy. Does a violent past lay the grounds for pro-secessionist preferences, or does it lead individuals to cling on to the territorial status quo? We study whether exposure to the events of the Spanish Civil War and its immediate aftermath made people more or less likely to support Catalan secession from Spain. Our analysis employs a dataset that combines a large N of individual-level survey data with historical data about repression and violence in each Catalan municipality. Findings indicate that current preferences for secession tend to diminish among the oldest Catalan generation that was exposed to higher levels of violence in their municipality. Most crucially, we show that exposure to violence created a sense of apathy towards politics among the oldest cohort, which eventually leads to a lower predisposition to support secession, a feeling that was not transmitted to subsequent generations. Our findings qualify some of the existing knowledge on the effects of past political violence on present political attitudes.

We examine the rise and mobilizational dynamics of social democracy, employing data reported by the Swedish authorities on the distribution of voting eligibility, turnout and partisan vote in local elections during the 1910s at a high level of disaggregation (by narrow income segments and administrative units). In line with the existing literature, we show that electoral socialism depended on both the extension of the suffrage to its ‘natural’ electorate, that is, the urban working class, and the organizational capacity of trade unions and other civic associations. In addition, we show that socialist support was not uniform within the working class – even for a highly homogeneous society. Instead, the social-democratic vote was initially stronger among low- to middle-income workers, only expanding to poor voters later in time. We complement our local data with an interwar panel analysis of socialist vote and post-war survey data.

This article offers an evaluation of cross-national measures of ethnic socio-economic inequality. It demonstrates that the measures differ in important ways regarding empirical scope, conceptualization, measurement and aggregation. Despite significant advances in the measurement of ethnic inequality, all measures have shortcomings, such as limited and biased coverage, as well as measurement error from the underlying data sources. Moreover, the empirical convergence between conceptually similar measures is strikingly low: some of the measures show no or even negative covariation. Four replication studies also indicate that extant measures of ethnic inequality are generally not interchangeable. Scholars should therefore take the various features highlighted in this evaluation into account before employing any of them. Based on this conclusion, the article offers multiple suggestions for improving existing measures and developing new ones.

The violent conclusion of Trump's 2017–21 presidency has produced sobering reassessments of American democracy. Elected officials' actions necessarily implicate public opinion, but to what extent did Trump's presidency and its anti-democratic efforts reflect shifts in public opinion in prior years? Were there attitudinal changes that served as early-warning signs? We answer those questions via a fifteen-wave, population-based panel spanning 2007 to 2020. Specifically, we track attitudes on system legitimacy and election fairness, assessments of Trump and other politicians, and open-ended explanations of vote choice and party perceptions. Across measures, there was little movement in public opinion foreshadowing Trump's norm-upending presidency, though levels of out-party animus were consistently high. Recent shifts in public opinion were thus not a primary engine of the Trump presidency's anti-democratic efforts or their violent culmination. Such stability suggests that understanding the precipitating causes of those efforts requires attention to other actors, including activists and elites.

Across Western democracies, immigration has become one of the most polarizing and salient issues, with public discourses and individual attitudes often characterized by misperceptions. This condition undermines people's ability to develop informed opinions on the matter and runs counter to the ideal of deliberative democracy. Yet, our understanding of what makes immigration so prone to misperceptions is still limited – a conundrum that this review seeks to answer in three steps. First, we take stock of the existing evidence on the nature of misperceptions about immigration. Secondly, we borrow from diverse bodies of literature to identify their motivational underpinnings and elaborate on how the protection of group identity, the defence of self-interest and security concerns can lead to distorted perceptions of immigration. Thirdly, we highlight relevant determinants of misperceptions at the level of both contextual influences and individual predispositions. We conclude that misperceptions about immigration are ubiquitous and likely to remain a key element of immigration politics.

Calls for civility feature prominently in public discourse, and the concept has received growing attention by political philosophers recently. But what does it mean to be civil? The existing literature distinguishes between two main understandings of civility: civility as politeness and civility as public-mindedness. The objective of this article is to show that these conceptions and the different normative claims associated with them can all fit together. We argue that civility and incivility should be disaggregated in order to uncover fruitful connections between different aspects of the concept. We introduce a distinction between two dimensions of civility as public-mindedness (moral and justificatory), as well as a new distinction between the means and ends of civility. We examine the complex connections between the different dimensions of (in)civility and show that the disaggregation of civility and incivility tells us what kind of (in)civility matters, as well as when and why.

The conventional view of corruption emphasizes its detrimental impact on the evaluations of public institutions. This view implies that in corruption-intense environments, the public should exert strong pressure on relevant authorities to combat corruption. Yet, multiple historical accounts suggest that in such contexts, corruption tends to thrive even despite extensive state-imposed anti-corruption measures. In this letter, we address this puzzle by studying the context-dependent effects of individual experiences of petty corrupt exchanges on the popular evaluation of public institutions. Drawing on the literature on the functionality of informal exchanges and normalization of corruption, we posit that negative effects of such experiences will be attenuated by the presence of institutional corruption among public service providers. In contexts permeated by corruption, corrupt exchanges will become routine, with limited effect on citizens' perceptions of street-level bureaucracy. Our empirical test, relying on a unique cross-national survey dataset from Central-Eastern Europe and a fine-grained ecological (municipality-level) indicator of corruption, largely supports these conjectures.

Politics and science have become increasingly intertwined. Salient scientific issues, such as climate change, evolution, and stem-cell research, become politicized, pitting partisans against one another. This creates a challenge of how to effectively communicate on such issues. Recent work emphasizes the need for tailored messages to specific groups. Here, we focus on whether generalized messages also can matter. We do so in the context of a highly polarized issue: extreme COVID-19 vaccine resistance. The results show that science-based, moral frame, and social norm messages move behavioral intentions, and do so by the same amount across the population (that is, homogeneous effects). Counter to common portrayals, the politicization of science does not preclude using broad messages that resonate with the entire population.

Few contemporary crises have reshaped public policy as dramatically as the COVID-19 pandemic. In its shadow, policymakers have debated whether other pressing crises—including climate change—should be integrated into COVID-19 policy responses. Public support for such an approach is unclear: the COVID-19 crisis might eclipse public concern for other policy problems, or complementarities between COVID-19 and other issues could boost support for broad government interventions. In this research note, we use a conjoint experiment, panel study, and framing experiment to assess the substitutability or complementarity of COVID-19 and climate change among US and Canadian publics. We find no evidence that the COVID-19 crisis crowds out public concern about the climate crisis. Instead, we find that the publics in both countries prefer that their governments integrate climate action into COVID-19 responses. We also find evidence that analogizing climate change with COVID-19 may increase concern about climate change.

Why do middle-income country governments use costlier sovereign debt markets when cheaper finance is available from official creditors? This research note argues that left-leaning governments with labor and the poor as core constituencies are likely to prioritize markets in their annual foreign borrowings. This is because markets provide an exit option from official creditor conditions that have disproportionately negative effects on working classes. This finding puts limits on disciplinary assumptions that left-leaning governments should have relatively less access to sovereign debt markets and thus use them less. Instead, left-leaning middle-income countries are likely to use proportionally more market finance as they fulfill annual foreign borrowing needs. This, in turn, shapes which middle-income countries are likely to become relatively more exposed to global debt market costs and pressures as they accumulate external debt over time.

When do voters punish corrupt politicians? Heterogeneous views about the importance of corruption can determine whether or not increased information enhances accountability. If partisan cleavages correlate with the importance voters place on corruption, then the consequences of information may vary by candidate, even when voters identify multiple candidates as corrupt. We provide evidence of this mechanism from a field experiment in a mayoral election in Brazil where a reputable interest group declared both candidates corrupt. We distributed fliers in the runoff mayoral election in São Paulo. Informing voters about the challenger's record reduced turnout by 1.9 percentage points and increased the opponent's vote by 2.6 percentage points. Informing voters about the incumbent's record had no effect on behavior. We attribute this divergent finding to differences in how each candidate's supporters view corruption. Using survey data and a survey experiment, we show that the challenger's supporters are more willing to punish their candidate for corruption, while the incumbent's supporters lack this inclination.