In the contemporary ‘age of participation’, referendums are often celebrated as cornerstones of democratic engagement. Yet political parties sometimes take the seemingly paradoxical step of calling for referendum boycotts, urging citizens to abstain from direct democratic processes. This paper investigates the conditions under which such boycott calls occur and the motivations behind them. While previous research has largely focused on single cases or experimental designs, we offer the first comprehensive, comparative study of party-led referendum boycotts across Europe since 1972. Drawing on a novel dataset of 223 referendums in 37 countries, we combine quantitative and qualitative methods to explore how regime context, institutional design, and issue type shape boycott behavior. Our regression analyses show that turnout quorum requirements, lower levels of democratic maturity, and sovereignty-related referendum issues significantly increase the likelihood of boycotts. To complement these findings, we qualitatively analyze boycott justifications and develop a typology of six motivation types: legitimacy-based, procedural unfairness, instrumental, tactical, minority interest, and ideological boycotts. These results reveal a complex interplay between democratic institutions and political strategy, challenging the assumption that referendums are universally inclusive tools. Our findings have implications for the design, interpretation, and normative evaluation of direct democratic practices across diverse political systems.

In March 2020, nine EU heads of state co-signed a letter demanding a coordinated response to the pandemic and the adoption of common debt. Recent literature has shown the relevance of the European Council in the response to the pandemic, as well as the rising importance of interstate coalitions in EU policymaking. Yet, empirical understanding of these coalitions is limited, and the literature largely assumes their constitution along ‘structuralist’ logics (e.g., ‘debtors’ vs. ‘creditors’). The emergence of a ‘solidarity coalition’ proposing the ‘coronabond’ is puzzling for its contrast with the euro crisis. The aim of this paper is to explain how these countries coalesced and to understand how that relates and informs a shift in the imperatives of ‘responsible government’ in the EU. Tracing the negotiation of the letter, through interviews and discourse analysis, the paper makes a critical contribution to our understanding of the evolution in EU economic governance.

Recent studies have drawn attention to the importance of pre-electoral coalitions in multiparty presidential democracies. Despite this, much scholarship has neglected the period during which pre-electoral coalitions turn into governing coalitions. Through a systematic cross-case analysis of Latin American cases, this paper examines why some coalition governments largely resemble the pre-electoral pacts that preceded them while others do not. The results lend credence to the legislative status granted by pre-election coalition members to the government, the low polarization among pre-electoral coalition members and the high ideological polarization in the legislature to explain the resemblance between pre- and post-electoral coalitions. Intriguingly, case-based analysis suggests that the temporal distance to government inauguration plays, at best, a marginal role in this process. These findings contribute to the still-growing literature on pre-electoral coalitions in presidential democracies by shedding light on the complex causation behind the pathway from pre-electoral bargaining to fully developed coalition governments.

Direct public funding (DPF) is a crucial resource for political parties in many of the world’s democracies. While research into the consequences of DPF has grown in prominence since the turn of the century, few efforts have been made to synthesize its findings. This article takes the first steps in doing so. Viewing DPF as an independent variable, we assess the impacts that party subsidization has on electoral competition, party organizations, party system development, and gender representation, before unpacking the intricacies of the DPF-corruption relationship. Given the inconclusive findings across these domains, the article discusses methodological challenges related to data availability and DPF operationalization, concluding with brief policy recommendations and several avenues for future research.

How do identities affect our political perceptions? Drawing on the social identity theory, we offer a new notion and empirical modeling strategy to study divergence in party placement perceptions. Our framework builds on the idea that membership in social groups has the potential to act as a social identity by systematically structuring perceptual divergence among groups. We conceptualize two consequences of social identity formation, ingroup favoritism and outgroup hostility: an ingroup effect brings a party closer to the preferred policy of the group; an outgroup effect pushes the party away. The approach permits detecting these effects and pinpoints the group-based characteristics producing perceptual polarization in multiparty systems using standard public opinion survey data. An application to the Basque region of Spain shows that over two decades, social identities around national sentiments and religion have produced the most perceptual divergence and polarization, whereas gender or social class do not structure party perceptions in the region.

While secessionist movements have surged globally over the past century, the prevailing structuralist and institutionalist approaches inadequately capture the dynamics of secessionism. We argue that lost autonomy triggers, sudden transformative events symbolizing a loss of autonomy for ethnic minorities, can be profoundly disruptive, eliciting pro-secessionist backlashes. Despite their significance, the causal impact of such triggering events remains underexplored. We investigate two typical cases: the 1992 Great Bank Affair in the Faroe Islands and the 2010 Spanish Constitutional Court decision to reform Catalonia’s autonomy statute. Using synthetic control models, we demonstrate that these triggering events were essential for the subsequent secessionist waves, which would not have occurred otherwise. Qualitative process tracing analyses further support our findings, indicating that these events were perceived as highly disruptive, causing significant shifts in public opinion and prompting political responses. Our findings underscore the importance of recognizing lost autonomy triggers as proximate causes of secessionism.

Low political trust disengages citizens from mainstream politics, stimulating anti-establishment voting and even electoral abstention. However, existing scholarship has largely overlooked the temporal dynamics of political trust. Next to high versus low trust, our study identifies two additional components of political trust: its long-term variability and its short-term variation. We employ fifteen waves of the Dutch LISS panel (2008–2023) to systematically test the impact of these three components of political trust on electoral behavior. We find that there are systematic and meaningful differences between stable and variable (dis)trusters. While trust levels are the strongest predictor of both support for anti-establishment and abstention, trust variability has an additional effect on electoral behavior. Short-term declines in political trust increase the chances of anti-establishment voting and abstention, independent of individuals’ overall trust levels and variability. These findings have important implications for our understanding of democratic alienation and critical citizenship.

Many, if not most, phenomena faced by political elites are characterized by uncertainty. This characterization also holds for the concept uncertainty itself, with conceptualizations and operationalizations differing both across and within bodies of scholarship. The conceptual vagueness poses a challenge to the accumulation of knowledge. To address this challenge, we integrate and expand existing work and develop an uncertainty grid to map phenomena (e.g., Covid-19; digitalization) or aspects thereof (e.g., vaccines; generative Artificial Intelligence [AI]). The uncertainty grid includes both the nature of a phenomenon’s uncertainty (epistemic and/or aleatory) and its level and enables labeling phenomena as certain, resolvably uncertain, or radically uncertain. We demonstrate the utility of the uncertainty grid by mapping the development of uncertainty during the Covid-19 pandemic onto it. Moreover, we discuss how researchers can use the grid to develop testable hypotheses regarding political elites’ behavior in response to uncertain phenomena.

The democratic backsliding literature sees reactionary shifts among the electorates of mature democracies as a reason for the rise of right-wing populism (RWP)—shifts that supposedly fuel citizens’ distrust in democratic institutions and their readiness to support RWP in its efforts to cut back on democracy’s liberal principles. However, the assumptions underlying this democracy falling narrative are more often stated than tested. Filling this void, we analyze data from the European Values Study/World Values Surveys in a cross-national longitudinal design amended by multilevel evidence, covering all EU countries surveyed at two distant timepoints over the past twenty to twenty-five years. We test whether reactionary shifts among socio-economically vulnerable electoral segments increased polarization over four ideological cleavages: right-vs-left on economic issues, nativism-vs-cosmopolitanism on immigration issues, patriarchy-vs-emancipation on sexuality issues, and economy-vs-environment on sustainability issues. Specifically, we examine whether those population segments at the reactionary end of these cleavages lost trust in democracies’ political institutions and their liberal principles in ways that increase voters’ readiness to support RWP parties. Our results provide no confirmation that polarizing shifts in the population account for RWP’s electoral rise. We conclude that the problems explaining RWP success do not originate in reactionary public opinion shifts. Instead, we propose further research into potential representation gaps with respect to nonvoter camps that grew larger during the pre-RWP era and are now mobilized by RWP parties—a game change presumably triggered by the rise of social media.

This study examines the relationship between economic performance and citizens’ satisfaction with democracy (SWD), emphasizing the moderating role of clarity of responsibility (CoR)—the extent to which political institutions enable voters to identify who is accountable for policy outcomes. While prior research offers mixed empirical evidence on the economic determinants of SWD, we argue that this inconsistency can be explained by variation in institutional clarity. Drawing on insights from the economic voting literature, we develop a theoretical framework positing that the economy has a stronger impact on democratic satisfaction in contexts where responsibility is clearly assigned. Using cross-national data from 30 democracies over three decades, and a refined measure of CoR, we find that economic effects on SWD are significantly amplified in high-clarity systems. These findings highlight the importance of institutional context in shaping how citizens evaluate the functioning of democratic governance.

Theoretical literature suggests at least three ways in which constitutional courts build social trust: democratic elements in the appointment of judges, technocratic qualities of the judges, and the impact of outcomes. This article contributes with empirical evidence to this theoretical debate. To do so, the article uses the case of Spain in the aftermath of the important ruling of the Constitutional Court on the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia. The findings of the research point at technocratic elements such as the perception of judicial independence being very relevant to explain trust in the court, unlike democratic elements such as the appointment of constitutional judges by elected politicians. Overall, the evidence presented by the article backs the general idea that de-politicization and increased technocratic qualities of constitutional courts would help them gain social trust.

A central tenet of democracy is “government of the people, by the people, for the people”, implying that representatives should reflect the citizens they serve. However, ethnic minorities, young people, women, and the working class are often underrepresented in legislatures. Previous literature suggests that increasing representation of these groups can address this bias, both by advancing their interests in policymaking and by providing symbolic value by signaling more inclusive government. To examine whether working-class politicians evoke stronger feelings of symbolic representation, particularly among the working class, I conduct a factorial survey experiment in Germany, in which 1,033 respondents rate five hypothetical political candidates with differing social and political profiles. The results indicate that people favor politicians from modest backgrounds and perceive them to be better representatives of citizens’ interests, more accessible, and more trustworthy. This effect is particularly prominent among respondents self-identifying as working class.

In the last decades deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) have gained significant attention as tools to reform and complement representative democracies, with many governments adopting them. Political representatives, though cautious about power dynamics, seem moderately supportive of extending these procedures. However, little is known about how this predisposition is affected by the institutional design of these procedures and how this might affect their adoption. This paper addresses this gap by presenting results from a conjoint experiment in France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Poland. The study, involving 716 representatives, examines how different attributes of deliberative procedures influence decisions to fund their adoption at the local and European levels. Findings show that the binding nature of DMPs is less important than composition characteristics, such as involving representatives in deliberations with citizens and organized civil society. Differences in preferences between local and European levels suggest awareness of challenges in scaling up DMPs.

This article provides a systematic literature review of the scholarly work on lobbying coalitions in political science, spanning the period from 1985 to 2023. By applying the PRISMA protocol for scoping reviews, the study maps the key trends, definitions adopted, research methods, and theoretical frameworks within this field, specifically focusing on the main explanations used to account for interest groups’ choice to form or join a coalition. The review reveals that the study of lobbying coalitions has grown in prominence, with a prevailing focus on the United States and the European Union and with a predominant use of large-N quantitative methods. The review identifies the dominance of behavioral definitions of interest groups and lobbying coalitions while also highlighting significant methodological gaps, particularly the underuse of social network analysis and qualitative comparative analysis. Furthermore, the study presents a meta-analysis of theoretical hypotheses, showing that the decision to form or join coalitions is primarily influenced by micro- and meso-level factors such as ideological affinity and issue salience. The review finds mixed empirical support for the idea that coalition formation serves as a ‘weapon of the weak’, with both weaker and stronger groups demonstrating likelihood of joining coalitions under certain conditions. The paper concludes by suggesting avenues for future research, including the further exploration of mixed-method designs and the potential for alternative methodological approaches to refine the understanding of lobbying coalitions.

This article argues that opposition to environmental protection is key to understanding the development of new voting patterns in Western Europe. We theorize climate change as a collective action problem with diffuse benefits and concentrated costs and develop a range of hypotheses about the ways in which concentrated resistance to climate change measures may be channelled into electoral behaviour. We test our hypotheses using data from the European Social Survey. Our results suggest that the backlash against environmental protection is triggered by the potential ‘losers’ of these processes, contributing to the emergence of a territorial cleavage between green voters residing in metropolitan areas, and far-right voters residing in rural and peripheral areas. Our argument explains the development of new political alliances and highlights the importance of green attitudes for the emergence of societal cleavages.

In recent years, many efforts have been made to bring quantitative and qualitative methods into dialogue. This article also moves in that direction. However, in contrast to most works, the present attempt does not concern the large-N/small-N issue but focuses instead on the sole single case study framework. Within this framework, two counterfactual methods, the historical counterfactual method, the qualitative one, and the synthetic control method, the quantitative one, have gained great importance without however meeting. This paper aims to advance mixed-methods research by bridging the gap between these two approaches. More precisely, it has assessed whether these two methods can be used together to understand what would have happened in a single case Z in the absence of an event X. The case study of the impact of Thatcher’s election on the UK pension system is then presented as an example of the joint use of the two methods.

Researchers assessing the nature of bicameralism have traditionally focused on the powers of upper chambers and potential (in)congruence with a lower chamber. Recently, the perceived legitimacy of upper chambers has been recognized as a vital third factor. However, previous studies measuring the upper chambers’ perceived legitimacy have (1) not considered whose perceived legitimacy is determinative (members of the institution vs. the general public) and (2) over-emphasized the input legitimacy. To explore the problems of the perceived legitimacy conceptualization, the qualitative content analysis of semi-structured interviews with Czech senators and Czech ‘ordinary citizens’ was used. It shows that perceptions among senators and the general public differ significantly. The results demonstrate that perceived legitimacy can be significantly influenced by factors such as the characteristics of senators, the apolitical nature of the institution’s processes, or the institution’s outputs. These may even overshadow the importance of input legitimacy in general, and democratic legitimacy in particular.

Since the 1990s, incumbent-led autocratization in democracies is increasingly common. However, there is surprisingly little systematic and comparative research into the actions would-be autocrats actually take when they undermine democracy. We analyse the wealth of in-depth case studies of all cases of incumbent-led autocratization in democracies from 1990 until 2023 to develop such an overview of autocratic actions inductively. This empirically based would-be autocrats’ toolkit encompasses over 400 unique autocratic actions which we classify into seven overarching modes of autocratization: evasion, manipulation, infiltration, duplication, restriction, prohibition, and delegitimation. Would-be autocrats selectively use these different modes in varying arenas of democracy to gradually erode democracy. The toolkit provides a starting point to more systematically study autocratization within and across different cases, enabling the identification of sequencing and diffusion patterns, and helping generate better understanding of when autocratization is successful.