The extensive scholarship devoted to the congruence of mass-elite policy preferences lacks consensus about the meaning, comparison, and measurement across political settings. This makes comparisons difficult and raises obstacles to advancing the debates. This symposium aims to identify the diversity of methodological choices and to reflect systematically on several key choices of particular importance in understanding the congruence. The contributions to the symposium compare and contrast how several types of measurement fare in diverse political contexts in Eastern Europe, Latin America, North Africa, and East Asia, and what we can learn from those methodological choices.

The study of mass-elite policy congruence has been limited by the lack of comprehensive data on the preferences and priorities of individual legislators. The University of Tokyo-Asahi Survey fills this lacuna through elite surveys whose response rates exceed ninety per cent. This article applies this data to comparing mass-elite policy preferences on constitutional revision, a core ideological dimension in post-war Japan. It shows that legislators generally follow the party line on policy position but veer closer to swing voters on policy prioritisation. This trend is stronger for electorally insecure legislators, who depend on independent voters to secure victory.

Contexts outside the advanced developed democracies present a challenge to assessing how well party systems reflect voter preferences across over-arching policy dimensions because not all electorates readily interpret political conflict in dimensional terms. In this contribution, I advocate an approach suited for such contexts that combines deductive and inductive elements: It starts out with what observers consider the most important dividing lines in a party system, and then goes on to operationalize these dimensions in an inductive fashion by drawing on all theoretically relevant items that are available in mass and elite surveys. I devise a relative-fit measure of responsiveness that can be compared across space and time, even if positions at the elite and mass levels are measured on different scales. To illustrate the usefulness of the strategy, I show how it leads to novel contrasts in terms of programmatic responsiveness among four Latin American countries, namely Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, and Bolivia.

This article argues for inductive exploration of mass–elite differences in new democracies. Grounded in the “delegate model” of political representation, I do this by studying issue positions and issue salience of masses before turning to elites. The article demonstrates this approach using Tunisia, the only Arab democracy, by analysing survey data and originally coded party manifesto data. From an issue position perspective, the article uncovers mass–elite incongruence on the democratic–authoritarian and secular–Islamist political dimensions. From an issue salience lens, there is mass–elite congruence on the economic dimension. How mass–elite incongruence unfolds might affect the future of democracy in Tunisia.

This article proposes a mixed-methods measurement of the mass-elite congruence of opinions on the EU based on a combination of speech and survey data. It focuses on two countries (Bulgaria and Romania) that were known for their pro-European profile until their EU accession, but which faced many political difficulties afterwards. The analysis covers the 2013–2017 period that includes a great deal of these post-accession difficulties. The article illustrates how we can make meaningful comparisons between short-term, dichotomous mass, and elite attitudes with timeframes determined by non-electoral events.

Does an increasing divide in ideological orientations influence citizens’ political behaviour? This study explores whether mass ideological polarisation stimulates individuals to become politically active in terms of poll attendance and non-electoral participation. In line with relative deprivation theory I argue that in an environment of ideological polarisation, individuals’ normative notions are threatened, increasing the probability that they will actively participate in the political decision-making process. Using the European Social Survey (2002–2014) and focusing on subnational regions, I conduct macro-level as well as multi-level analyses. Empirical results show that ideological polarisation indeed mobilises for non-electoral participation, while there is no such effect on voting. In the second step, I examine whether ideological extremism makes individuals more susceptible to environmental ideological polarisation. Findings show that members of the far right are more likely to become politically active when their social environment is divided over political ideology. In contrast, members of the far left are hardly motivated by rising polarisation regarding ideology.

The article explores the energy security relations of the European Union with the Russian Federation through the prism of the political discourse. It identifies key formations and topics related to the concept of security. Drawing on a detailed discourse analysis of 339 statements, interviews, speeches, press releases, and documents produced by EU political leaders and institutions, the article focuses on (a) the basic themes of EU political discourse on the energy security relations with Russia and (b) the perception of Russia by the European Union. The majority of the documents used in the article come from 2010 to 2019, the period of the second Barroso Commission and the Juncker Commission. At the theoretical level, the article is focused on the relationship between the main concept, political discourse, and security.

The literature on the relationship between European Union (EU) integration and regional power has produced two opposing theoretical models. Depending on the model, EU integration leads to either an increase or decrease in regional power. Evidence for both, however, has been largely inconclusive and mostly derived from qualitative case studies. This paper, on the other hand, offers a quantitative, large-N analysis, using data from fifty-six countries between 1960 and 2010. Its random effects model shows that EU membership considerably increases regional authority within member states over time, and its comparison with another international organization suggests that the effect is not idiosyncratic. Additionally, this paper finds support for two possible mechanisms: the establishment of the subsidiarity principle and the Commission’s requirement to create regional government structures.

Publication in academic journals is a critical part of the academic career. However, writing academic papers and getting them published is not a straightforward task. This article seeks to provide editors’ insights into the process of publishing by outlining common factors that lead to papers being rejected as well as charting strategies that ensure papers have the best chance of being sent out for review. The article discusses the important issue of peer review, including how best to respond to reviews and the expected academic conventions in terms of acting as reviewers.

The new generation of student often seems to respond extremely well to the delivery of information in a much more visual medium. One response is for universities to make more use of freely available screen capture software. By marrying this technology with relatively new visual presentation tools like Prezi, VideoScribe and Powtoon, lecturers can create dynamic, short screencast videos on all aspects of teaching and learning. This approach to the provision of additional “on demand” learning has been adopted by small groups of colleagues across the UK Higher Education sector, but, in the Department of Politics at the University of Reading, there has been a very specific focus on creating discipline-specific screencast videos to support assessment literacy and a greater understanding of assessment processes at an undergraduate level. These screencast videos explored advanced essay writing skills, dissertation writing, marking criteria, Harvard and Oxford referencing as well as supporting assessment processes. View rates, user behaviour data and survey results suggest that developing short, visual, screencast videos encourages engagement with assessment support, improves satisfaction and can increase student perceptions of their assessment literacy proficiency.

The succession of economic and financial crises, the migration crisis, and, of course, Brexit have raised many questions about the future of the European Union. Such crises present challenges for teaching and learning European Studies. This article discusses the question how to maintain a relevant study programme while taking into account ever-changing societal developments. Based on a survey conducted among students of a Bachelor in European Studies, and a subsequent focus group discussion, we look at programme relevance and programme capacity to deal with societal change in the context of a problem-based learning environment. Our study reveals that problem-based learning, when applied consistently and correctly, is a good educational approach to ensure that a study programme is relevant and capable of capturing societal change. At the same time, students seem to prefer a more guided version of problem-based learning, which presents challenges concerning its possible contribution to teaching and learning in times of crises. While we discuss the situation in one specific BA programme, we will do so in light of general challenges in the fields of European Studies, International Relations, and Politics.