Children with politically engaged parents are more likely to deviate from their parents’ political views in adulthood.

How do the political attitudes of parents influence those of their children? As Elias Dinas notes, a common assumption is that children from more politically engaged families are more likely to retain their parents’ political views. Taking issue with this perspective, he finds evidence that while young people from politicised homes may be more likely to acquire an initial partisan orientation from their parents, they are also more likely to abandon that preference as they enter adulthood and experience politics for themselves

Electoral participation strengthens party identification in the U.S.

It is well known that older people tend to be stronger supporters of their chosen political party than their younger counterparts. Elias Dinas uses data from the Socialization Panel Study to test the idea that the actual act of voting strengthens party identification. He concludes that consonant votes strengthen partisanship and discusses the specific implications of these findings on future elections in the US

The national effects of subnational representation: access to regional parliaments and national electoral performance

According to scholarly wisdom, party competition at the subnational level plays a negligible role in national elections. We provide theory and evidence that qualifies this view. Subnational elections determine entrance into subnational parliaments, which provides essential organizational resources: members and money. Since in most cases the same political actors compete at all levels of government, they can make use of these resources to improve their status in national party competition. We test our argument exploiting two institutional features of the German multi-level electoral context: the discontinuities generated by the 5% electoral threshold in German state elections, and the occurance of German state elections at different times in the federal election cycle. We find that parties that marginally cross the threshold for state parliamentary representation gain more members, and eventually perform better in national elections, but only if the party has sufficient time to organize between the state and the federal election. Consistent with our organizational explanation, bottom-up effects are more pronounced where state parliamentary parties receive more financial resources. Alternative mechanisms are tested, and receive no empirical support

No Country For Old Cleavages: Political attitudes and beliefs amidst the Greek debt crisis

The Greek youth enters in their formative period amidst a period of a severe debt crisis that has been having unforeseeable implications to the established party system. How do these new political developments affect the attitudes, beliefs and the repertoire of political actions of this generation? What is the role of old cleavages and traditional division lines in this ever-changing political setting? Drawing on a novel sample from university students, the paper assesses the impact of the crisis on young people’s political beliefs. The findings suggest that the classic left-right division is not adequate to represent the much more nuanced and complex divisions generated as a result of the crisis. Some of the information provided in this survey helps to explore the role of new seemingly important division lines in helping us understand the dynamics of party competition and public opinion

Making the breakthrough into Parliament boosts the electoral success of smaller political parties

Establishing the impact of legislative representation on parties’ subsequent electoral outcomes is very difficult due to how different parliamentary and non-parliamentary parties look. To address this problem, Elias Dinas, Pedro Riera and Nasos Roussias used an element that is quite common in multiparty systems – that is, legal thresholds of representation at the national level- and compared parties that are slightly above and barely below it. Looking at all post-WWII democracies with a national threshold of representation, they show that presence in parliament increases parties’ vote shares in the next election

You Have Got Mail! How Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations Shape Constituency Service in the European Parliament. IHS Political Science Series No. 140, May 2016

For representative democracy to work, legislators need to be responsive to the concerns of citizens. One way in which this can be achieved is through constituency service. Two factors drive constituency service: extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. Research to date suggests that extrinsic motivations are crucial for constituency service. Yet, this evidence stems primarily from the US context characterized by a personal ballot structure and campaign content which may bias findings in favor of extrinsic motivations. We present evidence from the first ever field experiment conducted in the European Parliament (EP) in which we vary both the extrinsic and intrinsic motivations of legislators. What is more, we are able to examine the way in which intrinsic and extrinsic motivations interact, an aspect largely ignored in the literature. Our findings suggest that while intrinsic motivations matter most for constituency service in the EP, they are dampened by the presence of extrinsic motivations

You have got mail! How intrinsic and extrinsic motivations shape constituency service in the European Parliament

"For representative democracy to work, legislators need to be responsive to the concerns of citizens. One way in which this can be achieved is through constituency service. Two factors drive constituency service: extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. Research to date suggests that extrinsic motivations are crucial for constituency service. Yet, this evidence stems primarily from the US context characterized by a personal ballot structure and campaign content which may bias findings in favor of extrinsic motivations. We present evidence from the first ever field experiment conducted in the European Parliament (EP) in which we vary both the extrinsic and intrinsic motivations of legislators. What is more, we are able to examine the way in which intrinsic and extrinsic motivations interact, an aspect largely ignored in the literature. Our findings suggest that while intrinsic motivations matter most for constituency service in the EP, they are dampened by the presence of extrinsic motivations." (author's abstract

Staying in the First League: Parliamentary Representation and the Electoral Success of Small Parties

Why are some small parties successful whereas others wither away? Despite the voluminous literature on parties and party families, we have a limited understanding of what explains small party success. Most studies tend to emphasize the role of social cleavages and electoral systems. Instead, we propose a new institutional explanation that treats entering parliament as a key resource for small parties. Parliamentary entrance signals organizational capacity and candidates’ appeal, and reduces uncertainty about parties’ ideological profile. Taking advantage of the discontinuities generated by thresholds of representation, we estimate the causal effect of entering parliament on the future vote shares of small parties. We use a new data set that covers all post-WWII democracies with a national threshold of representation. Results indicate that presence in parliament increases parties’ vote share in the next election. Importantly, entering parliament is more important for parties in new democracies, where party branding is weak and the need for signaling is high

The European refugee crisis and public support for the externalisation of migration management

What preferences do people have for cross-country cooperation on irregular migration and refugee protection? Existing research improves our understanding of how voters react to large-scale inflows of asylum seekers, like those experienced by European countries in 2015–2016, and the type of asylum seekers and policies preferred by European citizens. We know less, however, about people's views concerning a particular European Union (EU) response to the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, namely the cooperation with Turkey in March 2016 to stem inflows of asylum seekers and other migrants. To study such views, we build on several strands of the international relations literature exploring key determinants of public preferences for international cooperation on cross-national issues, namely (a) sociotropic concerns, (b) humanitarian considerations, and (c) perceptions of fairness and reciprocity. Our research design leverages conjoint experiments conducted simultaneously in Germany, Greece and Turkey. We find that the three factors indeed play a role in explaining preferences in the three countries. Moreover, while respondents are favourable to several core features of the current EU–Turkey migration deal (regarding the return of irregular migrants, financial aid to refugees, and border controls), we also find evidence of public support for increased cooperation on resettlement and EU support to Greece to deal with migration, which goes beyond the status quo. In certain aspects of cooperation, public preferences seem to respond to interactions between policy dimensions that capture reciprocity. These findings have important implications for research on public preferences for asylum and migration policies and public support for international cooperation more generally

Waking up the golden dawn: does exposure to the refugee crisis increase support for extreme far-right parties?

Does exposure to the refugee crisis fuel support for extreme-right parties? Despite heated debates about the political repercussions of the refugee crisis in Europe, there exists very little - and sometimes conflicting - evidence with which to assess the impact of a large influx of refugees on natives' political attitudes and behavior. We provide causal evidence from a natural experiment in Greece, where some Aegean islands close to the Turkish border experienced sudden and drastic increases in the number of Syrian refugees while other islands slightly farther away - but with otherwise similar institutional and socioeconomic characteristics - did not. Placebo tests suggest that precrisis trends in vote shares for exposed and nonexposed islands were virtually identical. This allows us to obtain unbiased estimates of the electoral consequences of the refugee crisis. Our study shows that among islands that faced a massive but transient inflow of refugees passing through just before the September 2015 election, vote shares for Golden Dawn, the most extreme-right party in Europe, moderately increased by 2 percentage points (a 44 percent increase at the average). The finding that mere exposure to the refugee crisis is sufficient to fuel support for extreme-right parties has important implications for our theoretical understanding of the drivers of antirefugee backlash