Rahva usaldus parlamendi vastu Euroopa riikides

Käesolevas magistritöös võtan vaatluse alla parlamendi kui keskse poliitilise institutsiooni usaldamise rahva seas. Usaldus riigi demokraatliku esinduskogu vastu ilmestab hästi suhtumist kogu poliitilise süsteemi legitiimsusesse. Usaldus poliitiliste institutsioonide vastu on viimastel aastatel leidnud palju kajastust nii meedias kui ka teaduskirjanduses. Kui ajakirjanduses on peamiselt pandud rõhku kriisinarratiivile, siis teadlaskonna seas on tegeletud mitmetasandilise lähenemise arendamisega poliitilisele usaldusele. Oma uurimusega soovingi anda panuse poliitilise usalduse mitmetasandilise käsitluse edasisse arendamisse. Lähtun töös eeldusest, et usaldus parlamendi vastu ei ole käsitletav lihtsalt indiviidi või institutsiooni enda karakteristikuna, vaid erinevate dimensioonide omavahelise koosmõju tulemina. Kesksel kohal töös kasutatavas teoreetilises mudelis on indiviidi rahulolu režiimi tulemuslikkusega. Töö empiirilised tulemused kinnitavad suures osas eelnevalt püstitatud hüpoteese. Parlamenti usaldatakse enam rikastes ja madala korruptsioonitasemega riikides, mille valitsused on suutnud riigi rahanduse enam-vähem korras hoida. Samas esinevad ka riigisiseselt usalduses suured erinevused. Koostan nii poliitilise süsteemi välistest (eksogeensetest) kui sisestest (endogeesetest) muutujatest koosneva indiviidi tasandi mudeli, mis omab märkimisväärset seletusjõudu nii kõikides valimisse kaasatud riikides eraldi kui kogu valimi lõikes. Tulemused kinnitavad, et parlamenti usaldavad enam kõrgemalt haritud ja sissetulekuga paremini toimetulevad, poliitikast huvitatud ja demokraatiat tähtsustavad inimesed, kes toetavad valitsusse kuuluvaid erakondi ning on rahul riigi majandusliku olukorra ning haridus- ja tervishoiusüsteemi kvaliteediga. Kõige tugevamat mõju parlamendi usaldamisele omab rahulolu riigi majandusliku olukorraga, mida võib omakorda käsitleda ka vahendava muutujana. Süvendatud analüüs kinnitab, et rahulolu riigi majandusega on tugevalt mõjutatud režiimi objektiivsest tulemuslikkusest (elatus- ja korruptsioonitase, eelarvedistsipliin, majanduskasv) ning ka indiviidi rahulolust leibkondliku sissetulekuga. Seega vahendab režiimi majandusliku tulemuslikkusega rahulolu ka makrotasandi ning eksogeensete indiviidi tasandi muutujate mõju parlamendi usaldamisele.http://www.ester.ee/record=b4415567~S1*es

How voting advice applications can be used to study the positions of political parties

Voting advice applications are typically used to inform voters ahead of elections, but can these tools also help us to understand where parties are located within the political space? Drawing on a new study, Frederico Ferreira da Silva, Andres Reiljan, Lorenzo Cicchi, Alexander H. Trechsel and Diego Garzia illustrate the potential for voting advice applications to act as a data source for studying political parties and their positions

Longitudinal dataset of political issue-positions of 411 parties across 28 European countries (2009–2019) from voting advice applications EU profiler and euandi

First published online: 02 July 2020This data article provides a descriptive overview of the “EU Profiler/euandi trend file (2009–2019)“ dataset and the data collection methods. The dataset compiles party position data from three consecutive pan-European Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), developed by the European University Institute for the European Parliament elections in 2009, 2014 and 2019. It includes the positions of 411 parties from 28 European countries on a wide range of salient political issues. Altogether, the dataset contains more than 20 000 unique party positions. To place the parties on the political issues, all three editions of the VAA have used the same iterative method that combines party self-placement and expert judgement. The data collection has been a collective effort of several hundreds of highly trained social scientists, involving experts from each EU member state. The political statements that the parties were placed on, were identical across all the countries and 15 of the statements remained the same throughout all three waves (2009, 2014, 2019) of data collection. Because of the unique methodology and the large volume of data, the dataset offers a significant contribution to the research on European party systems and on party positioning methodologies

Patterns of affective polarization toward parties and leaders across the democratic world

Published online: 29 June 2023Research indicates that affective polarization pervades contemporary democracies worldwide. Although some studies identify party leaders as polarizing agents, affective polarization has been predominantly conceptualized as a product of in-/out-party feelings. This study compares levels of party affective polarization (PAP) and leader affective polarization (LAP) cross-nationally, using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. Applying like–dislike scales and an identical index to both concepts, we reveal that while the two strongly correlate, LAP is systematically lower than PAP. The United States emerges as an exceptional case, being the only country where LAP significantly exceeds PAP. Drawing on regime input/output and institutions as theoretical building blocks, we explore cross-national variations and show that the relative strength of LAP vis-à-vis PAP is increased by presidential regime type, poor government performance, and low party system fragmentation. The findings of this study contribute to the thriving research on affective polarization and personalization of politics

The politics of differentiated integration : what do governments want? country report - Estonia

This paper studies the salience of and government positions towards differentiated integration (DI) in the European Union in Estonian politics. As the keyword analysis reveals, conceptual debates over DI occur very rarely in Estonia and are usually invoked by specific events, such as ratifying the Lisbon Treaty, joining the eurozone or holding the European Council presidency. On the level of specific DI instances, the salience was much higher, often reflecting the importance of certain policies in Estonian foreign policy agenda or a high level of internal polarization over some specific DI policy. Regarding government’s position towards DI, there has been a notable improvement over the years. In the first years after joining the EU in 2004, Estonian politicians very clearly negative towards DI, mostly due to apparent fear of remaining into the slower less integrated group of countries. After joining the eurozone in 2011, the government made a swift change in their position and started showing much more optimism towards certain forms of DI. This rather positive position remained mostly unaltered throughout the last decade, although the government politicians have always emphasised that their first preference is for an EU that moves on together with all the Member States.This working paper is part of the InDivEU project which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 82230

Ideological tripolarization, partisan tribalism and institutional trust : the foundations of affective polarization in the Swedish multiparty system

First published online: 16 January 2021Currently, very little is known about the individual level foundations of affective polarization outside the US context. This paper addresses this research gap by exploring the predictors of affective polarization in Sweden, using nationally representative survey data. From 2010 till the 2018 elections, the Swedish multiparty system was divided into two affectively converged mainstream party blocs that were moderately polarized between each other, and an asymmetrically polarized populist right party that invoked significantly more hostility from the supporters of mainstream parties than vice versa. To unpack the foundations of affective polarization in such a tripolar configuration, we employ a methodological approach that distinguishes not just between in‐ and outparties but also in‐ and out‐blocs, and separates different conflict dimensions. We find that: (1) voters with stronger partisan identities and more extreme political attitudes exhibit higher levels of affective polarization. The latter, however, is a better predictor of direct dislike towards political opponents; (2) the effects of political attitudes correspond to the tripolar nature of the party system: while affective polarization between the centre‐right and ‐left blocs is mostly driven by socioeconomic positions, the hostility towards Sweden Democrats links predominantly to cultural issues, most notably immigration; (3) institutional trust has a two‐edged relationship with affective polarization: populist right voters that trust the country’s central institutions more, are less polarized towards mainstream blocs, whereas among centre‐right voters, higher trust associates with stronger animosity towards Sweden Democrats. We believe that these findings could have broad implications for affective polarization research in multiparty systems

Editorial: Affective polarization in comparative perspective

Published online: 23 January 2023The proliferation of research on affective polarization started about a decade ago when Iyengar et al. (2012) brought this hitherto very sparsely used concept under the spotlight. Challenging the dominant ideological paradigm, they argued for an alternative definition of polarization based on partisan feelings. Affective polarization can be defined as the simultaneous presence of affinity toward one's own party and fellow partisans (in-group) and hostility toward opposite political parties or compatriots with opposing political identities [out-group(s)]. This seminal article has been followed by a myriad of research on the topic (see Iyengar et al., 2019 for an overview). However, a large majority of this literature has focused solely on the two-party system of the US context, with comparative research lagging behind. This does not mean that intensely polarized partisan feelings are not present elsewhere: some recent comparative studies have highlighted that the USA is not a unique case and affective polarization clearly constitutes a global phenomenon (Gidron et al., 2020; Reiljan, 2020; Wagner, 2021; Torcal and Comellas, 2022). Yet, the study of affective polarization outside of the United States is still in its infancy. This Research Topic aims to address this gap and broaden our knowledge of affective polarization, especially in multiparty settings. The following eight articles provide a geographically and thematically diverse set of contributions that examine affective polarization in terms of its conceptualization and measurement, causes and consequences

A Regional Perspective to the Study of Affective Polarization

This research note investigates the scope of regional variations in levels of affective polarization across Europe and contrasts it to national scores to highlight the theoretical and empirical interest of a disaggregated approach. Using all waves of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) dataset, we compute an affective polarization score for 143,857 individuals and aggregate these scores in 190 regions nested in 30 countries, across a period ranging from 1996 to 2019, covering 105 elections. We map variations in affective polarization across regions, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Our results reveal that the range of scores is larger across regions than between countries, and that approximately half of the variation in affective polarization scores can be attributed to within-country heterogeneity. Second, we find that some countries display rather homogeneous regional patterns, while others display heterogeneous scores. Third, we show how the increase in the affective polarization scores over time at the national level can be driven by sharp changes in some regions only, other regions remaining stable. Overall, these results point to the added value of adopting a regional approach to the study of affective polarization.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Party placement in the void : the European political space in 10 years of cross-national voting advice applications

With this paper, we pay tribute to Peter Mair by looking back at the three waves (2009, 2014, 2019) of the pan-European Voting Advice Application (VAA) EU Profiler/euandi – a project in which Peter Mair had a very crucial role in its early years. We describe the unique standing of the EU Profiler/euandi in the VAA landscape and take an analytical look at the central elements of this tool. We show the project has been innovative in many ways, such as: a) in 2014 and 2019, more than half of the over 200 parties included in the project took part in the self-placement procedure, showing great interest towards the pan-European VAA; b) the EU Profiler/euandi team has managed to apply a common set of issue-statements to the whole EU and find the topics that are both salient (on most statements, more than 80% of the parties have been coded to have a distinguishable position) and polarize between parties (in a large majority of issues, there is a considerable share of parties on both sides of the centrepoint of the scale); c) the party placements on the central dimensions of the political space show high external validity with other prominent methods of party placement. At the same time, we reveal worrisome regional divergences, as the post-communist countries are less likely to co-operate with the VAA in self-placing themselves, have more parties that are left uncoded on many issues, and party positions in this region show less convergence with other methods. Also, when studying issue polarization at the European level, we demonstrate that party positions are often determined rather by the regional than ideological affiliation of the parties, raising some questions about whether and to what extent can we even talk about common EU political space. In the end of the paper, we present the data from the German euandi2021, one of the national stepping stones towards improving the VAA for the 2024 European edition. The paper ends with a retrospective discussion of which hopes and promises from more than a decade ago have/have not materialized

InDivEU : party preferences data

1 data file; 1 documentation fileThis dataset contains party positions on questions of (differentiated) European integration. It contains data on more than 400 parties and covers 28 countries (EU27 + UK). The data was retrieved from two pre-existing datasets. First, the EU profiler/euandi dataset, which covers the European Parliamentary elections of 2009, 2014, and 2019. Three additional original party positions on questions of differentiated integration are included in the current dataset, based on assessments by euandi country experts in 2019. Second, the Chapel Hill Expert survey waves of 2010, 2014, and 2019.The dataset is part of the Horizon 2020 InDivEU project “Integrating Diversity in the European Union” (grant agreement No 822304)