Political Studies

Mature welfare states must increasingly handle growing fiscal pressures and a multitude of needs with smaller resources. Meanwhile, evaluations of policy outputs are characterized as ‘the weakest link’ in welfare state support, resulting in generalized political distrust. We assess the procedural fairness argument that citizens are not only concerned with welfare state outcomes but also assess the fairness of the processes of service delivery. The fairness perspective has usually been tested in cross-sectional studies, experiments or on the ‘input side’ of democracy. By contrast, we use primary three-wave panel data on evaluations and experiences with welfare state institutions. The random-effects within-between framework allows improved causal evidence that both outputs (service quality satisfaction) and procedural fairness (experienced voice opportunities) affect political trust. Crucially, however, perceived fairness mitigates detrimental effects of poor outcomes. This is because procedural voice matters, especially for the formation of political trust among losers.

How can we explain variation in demand for redistribution among cross-pressured voters? We argue that redistributive preferences reflect an interaction between material self-interest and political ideology. The self-interest argument predicts growing opposition to redistribution as income increases, while the argument of ideologically driven preferences suggests that left-leaning citizens are more supportive of redistribution than right-leaning citizens. Focusing on cross-pressured voters, we expect that the difference in redistribution preferences between left- and right-leaning citizens is smaller at the bottom of the income hierarchy than at the top. Among the group of left-leaning citizens, the role of material self-interest is expected to be smaller than among right-leaning citizens. We provide evidence in line with our argument analysing data from the European Social Survey in 25 European democracies between 2008 and 2018.

Humans are prone to producing morally suboptimal and even disastrous outcomes out of ignorance. Ignorance is generally thought to excuse agents from wrongdoing, but little attention has been paid to group-based ignorance as the reason for some of our collective failings. I distinguish between different types of first-order and higher order group-based ignorance and examine how these can variously lead to problematic inaction. I will make two suggestions regarding our epistemic obligations vis-a-vis collective (in)action problems: (1) that our epistemic obligations concern not just our own knowledge and beliefs but those of others, too and (2) that our epistemic obligations can be held collectively where the epistemic tasks cannot be performed by individuals acting in isolation, for example, when we are required to produce joint epistemic goods.

Are political parties in young democracies responsive to the policy preferences of the public? Compared to extensive scholarship on party responsiveness in established democracies, research on party responsiveness in young democracies is limited. We argue that weaker programmatic party–voter linkages in post-communist democracies create incentives for parties to respond to their supporters rather than the more general electorate. Such responsiveness occurs in two ways. First, parties follow shifts in the mean position of their supporters. Second, drawing on the research on party–voter congruence, we argue that parties adjust their policy positions to eliminate previous incongruence between themselves and their supporters. Analyses based on a comprehensive dataset that uses expert surveys, parties’ manifestoes and election surveys to measure parties’ positions, and several cross-national and national surveys to measure voters’ preferences provide strong support for this argument.

Party competition in Great Britain increasingly revolves around social or ‘cultural’ issues as much as it does around the economic issues that took centre stage when class was assumed to be dominant. We use data from surveys of members of parliament, party members and voters to explore how this shift has affected the internal coalitions of the Labour and Conservative Parties – and to provide a fresh test of ‘May’s Law’. We find a considerable disconnect between ‘neoliberal’ Conservative members of parliament and their more centrist voters on economic issues and similarly significant disagreement on cultural issues between socially liberal Labour members of parliament and their more authoritarian voters. We also find differences in both parties between parliamentarians and their grassroots members, albeit that these are much less pronounced. May’s Law, not for the first time, appears not to be borne out in reality.

This article identifies a blind spot in constructivist theories of representation and their account of legitimacy in terms of the challenge posed by ecologies of social ignorance, generally and especially during foundational moments. Social ignorance is conceptualised here not merely as the absence of knowledge or true belief but as a social practice of legitimising epistemically problematic political imaginaries and the institutional systems they underpin. In dialogue with social epistemologists and phenomenologists, the article shows how representation can nurture social ignorance, despite the availability of ample opportunities for political contestation and alternative opinion formation. A permanent feature of democratic politics, this problem becomes most salient during moments of constitutional re-founding, such as regime change, post-conflict reconstruction or constitutional referenda, when representative claims can reconfigure a community’s political imaginary, rendering it more or less ignorant. The representative claims made by the Vote Leave’s key figures during the Brexit referendum campaign serve as illustration.

Liberal nationalists argue that identification with the nation promotes feelings of mutual obligation, including support for redistribution. Existing attempts to test this hypothesis have focused on whether the higher sense of national identity among the majority increases support redistribution. We argue for a twofold shift in focus. First, beyond the majority’s own national identity, we need to explore their perceptions of whether minorities share this identity. Second, we need to shift from one-dimensional ideals of ‘identity’ to more complex ideas of attachment and commitment. Do members of the majority view minorities as committed to the nation and willing to make sacrifices for it? Drawing on a custom-designed online survey in Canada, we show that three salient out-groups (Aboriginal peoples, French-speaking Canadians and immigrants) are seen by majority respondents as less committed to Canada, and that this is a powerful predictor of support for general and inclusive redistribution.

The study of populist attitudes has thus far drawn heavily on ideational definitions of populism, focussing almost exclusively on attitudes related to dimensions such as people-centredness and anti-elitism. However, these accounts have largely ignored other approaches to populism, especially the discursive-performative school which see populism as something that is communicated and done by political actors. We argue that when studying populist attitudes, these approaches are not mutually exclusive. In this article, we develop a novel measure of attitudes towards populist communication and consider how these interact with populist ideational attitudes. Testing our measures on the Australian case, we demonstrate that attitudes towards populist communication exist independently of populist ideational attitudes, and that they have a significant effect on voting behaviour and on attitudes related to the ideational approach. Therefore, we argue that studies of populist attitudes need to take attitudes towards populist communication into account in future work.

Scholars have identified a host of individual-level and contextual factors associated with variation in people’s attitudes toward immigrants. In this article, we argue that individual traits that are conducive to a positive or negative attitude toward immigrants tend to be more strongly connected to attitudes the larger the share of people with similar traits in the individual’s immediate living environment. This is because interacting with like-minded people is likely to strengthen one’s pre-existing views. We test this reasoning using data on more than 3000 individuals nested within more than 100 neighborhoods in the city of Turku, Finland. We find that the attitudes of young adults tend to be more positive the more people with characteristics predicting a positive attitude there are in their neighborhood, while their attitudes tend to be more negative the more people there are with a low level of education, a strong predictor of negative attitudes.

This article examines parliaments as symbol-makers beyond the actions of individual Members of Parliament or parliamentary party groups. In doing so, it develops an analytical framework for studying how legislatures symbolically represent women and, more generally, how they stand for gender equality. The article identifies who are the symbol-makers on behalf of the institution and outlines several indicators that allow assessing how the symbolic may further the gender sensitivity of parliaments. The indicators are clustered into two domains: on one hand, physical spaces, and, on the other hand, communications and public outreach. Drawing on examples from parliaments around the world, the article documents the wide range of available repertoires aimed at eroding the association between politics and masculinity. It also discusses the expected impact of symbolic activity on the targeted audiences and pinpoints the ways in which descriptive, substantive and symbolic representation build onto each other.