When do membership-based civil society organizations such as interest groups, political parties or service-oriented organizations consider their existence under threat? Distinguishing pressures of organizational self-maintenance from functional pressures of goal attainment, which all voluntary membership organizations – irrespective of their political or societal functions - need to reconcile, we propose a framework theorizing distinct categories of drivers of mortality anxiety in organized civil society. To test our hypotheses, we apply ordered logistic regression analysis to new data covering regionally and nationally active interest groups, service-oriented organizations and parties in Germany, Norway, Switzerland and the UK. We find that factors enhancing intraorganizational resilience thereby facilitating self-maintenance as well as exposure to different representation challenges complicating goal attainment have significant effects on mortality anxiety experienced by interest groups, political parties and service-oriented organizations alike – the former reducing, the latter enhancing it. Stressing the importance of a stable, durable organizational infrastructure with loyal and involved members to operate in increasingly volatile and diverse environments, our findings highlight the on-going importance of ‘traditional’ (sometimes considered ‘outdated’) organization-building.

We compare gender gaps in attitudes towards redistribution and social spending across generations in the USA and Britain. We show that the US context, characterized by lower welfare provision, results in consistent or even widening gender gaps for generations born post-1925. On the other hand, the British context, characterized by higher welfare provision relative to the USA, exhibits a narrowing and closing of the gender gap for younger generations, for two out of three indicators of spending preferences. These findings provide some, albeit mixed, evidence that women are more consistently in favour of social spending and redistribution than men in contexts characterized by low welfare provision such as the USA. Where there are higher levels of social support, we argue women could become increasingly more likely to express a preference for levels of spending and redistribution that is similar to men's, narrowing the gender gap among younger generations.

New centrist anti-establishment parties (CAPs) are successful competitors in Central and Eastern Europe. Due to their emphasis on anti-establishment rhetoric and a moderate ideological platform, their breakthrough is usually explained by voters’ dissatisfaction with existing parties. However, little is known about the ideological component of their support. Expectations on the impact of ideology on vote choice in the protest voting literature range from ‘pure protest voting’, which denies any impact of ideology, to a more moderate approach, which combines protest and ideological considerations. Using survey data, I confirm that CAPs attract voters with lower levels of political trust, but ideology also matters. The degree of ideological sorting, however, varies. While some CAPs mainly attract voters from one side of the political spectrum, others attract voters from the left to the right more equally. The differences in the initial composition of their electorates have implications for the parties’ future.

In this paper, we study the relationship between occupational vulnerability and attitudes toward immigration in Western Europe. We measure occupational vulnerability as the risk of unemployment due to routine-biased technological change and offshoring of jobs to other countries. Previous empirical studies in political economy have shown that individuals’ policy preferences echo their economic risks and prospects. Workers in low routine occupations are most worried about their job market prospects, most likely to demand social protection and least likely to support free trade. We find that attitudes toward immigration become considerably more negative as occupational task routineness increases. We do not find a similar association between occupational offshorability and immigration attitudes. Direct exposure to global competition is not associated with increased worries about immigration. However, offshorability seems to be associated with the polarization of attitudes toward immigration between routine and nonroutine workers.

Governments claim to establish lobbying registers with the intent of giving citizens and the media the opportunity to see who is lobbying whom and for what purpose. This external scrutiny is expected to help prevent undue influence and corruption. Scholars, however, have noted that transparency might also serve internal scrutinizers by providing information to the lobbyists themselves. This study employed a survey of more than 300 interest groups in Ireland to test this alternative to the ‘armchair scrutiniser’ assumption, whereby transparency serves the purpose only of public scrutiny. The analysis found that a small but well-defined group of organizations routinely accesses the website of the Irish lobbying register and ‘consumes’ the information during the advocacy process. Interest-group characteristics, such as group type and material resources, help explain these trends. This study is relevant for scholars interested in the effects of transparency and how the availability of information is linked to lobbying strategies.

Why do some military deployment decisions lead to high levels of political contestation, whereas others do not? Or, put differently, when does parliamentary consensus on the use of force abroad exist? In this article, we aim to answer this question by focusing on the varying levels of consensus in national parliaments when taking military deployment decisions. We do so by examining conditions that were derived from research on the domestic-level determinants of the use of force, parliamentary voting, and opposition behaviour. These conditions were included in an integrated theoretical framework, which we tested with fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The results of our analysis show that the international legal status and the objectives of the military operation are of crucial importance for explaining the pattern of political contestation. However, domestic variables need to be taken into account as well to fully explain the level of political contestation of military deployment decisions.

Are populist actors more like a hurricane that risks undermining democracy? Or do they aim for a different type of democracy, which strengthens popular control? This article offers one of the most extensive, systematic analyses on the impact of populism on multiple functions of the Quality of Democracy. Going beyond the view of ‘high-’ or ‘low-quality’ democracies, we emphasize that the Quality of Democracy is related to multiple dimensions or ‘functions of democracy’, characterized by important trade-offs. We argue that populist actors exert differentiated effects across these functions, depending on their degree of government access and host ideology. Our analysis relies on a new disaggregated dataset covering 53 established democracies in diverse world regions over the period between 1990 and 2016. We find that populist actors increase participation and representation, especially if they are confined to the opposition and especially if they belong to the political left-wing. In contrast, we find a negative impact of populists across the spectrum on institutional safeguards, such as the rule of law and state transparency. In sum, our findings indicate that populism has a variable impact on multiple aspects of democratic quality which should be systematically investigated in a disaggregated manner that is sensitive to these differences.