The Opinion-Policy Nexus in Europe and the Role of Political Institutions

A strong link between citizen preferences and public policy is one of the key goals and criteria of democratic governance. Yet, our knowledge about the extent to which public policies on specific issues are in line with citizen preferences in Europe is limited. This article reports on the first study of the link between public opinion and public policy that covers a large and diverse sample of concrete public policy issues in 31 European democracies. The findings demonstrate a strong positive relationship and a substantial degree of congruence between public opinion and the state of public policy. Also examined is whether political institutions, including electoral systems and the horizontal and vertical division of powers, influence the opinion‐policy link. The evidence for such effects is very limited, which suggests that the same institutions might affect policy representation in countervailing ways through different mechanisms

Activism and radical politics in the digital age: Towards a typology

This article aims to develop a typology for evaluating different types of activism in the digital age, based on the ideal of radical democracy. Departing from this ideal, activism is approached in terms of processes of identification by establishing conflictual frontiers to outside Others as either adversaries or enemies. On the basis of these discussions, we outline a typology of four kinds of activists: the salon activist, the contentious activist, the law-abiding activist, and the Gandhian activist. The typology’s first axis, between antagonism and agonism, is derived from normative discussions in radical democracy concerning developing frontiers. The second axis, about readiness to engage in civil disobedience, is derived from a review of studies of different forms of online activism. The article concludes by suggesting that the different forms of political engagement online have to be taken into account when studying how online activism can contribute to social change

Inherited Institutions: Cooperation in the Light of Democratic Legitimacy

We experimentally investigate whether the procedural history of a sanctioning institution affects cooperation in a social dilemma. Subjects inherit the institutional setting from a previous generation of subjects who either decided on the implementation of the institution democratically by majority vote or were exogenously assigned a setting. In order to isolate the impact of the voting procedure, no information about the cooperation history is provided. In line with existing empirical evidence, we observe that in the starting generation cooperation is higher (lower) with a democratically chosen (rejected) institution, as compared to the corresponding, randomly imposed setting. In the second generation, the procedural history only partly affects cooperation. While there is no positive democracy effect when the institution is implemented, the vote-based rejection of the institution negatively affects cooperation in the second generation. The effect size is similar to that in the first generation