Welfare cuts – how framing influences support

Talking about economic reform, Jean-Claude Juncker once remarked: “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it”. That politicians get punished for welfare cutbacks used to be a truism in politics and academia. A couple of years later, we are not so sure anymore. Here, Paul Marx and Gijs Schumacher outline how important framing policy is, and how undecided voters might be more easily swayed by particular messages to support welfare cuts

Staying loyal or leaving the party? How open and extrovert personality traits help explain vote switching

Why are some citizens more likely to change their vote choice? Bert Bakker, Robert Klemmensen, Asbjørn Sonne Nørgaard and Gijs Schumacher show that vote switching is associated with citizen’s personality traits. Looking at UK and Denmark, they find that openness helps explain vote switching in both countries. In Denmark having a more extrovert personality is associated with party loyalty, but this does not hold for the UK

Why governing parties change their platforms more frequently than those in opposition

Following an election, are parties that enter government more likely to alter their electoral platform than parties in opposition? Gijs Schumacher, Marc van de Wardt, Barbara Vis and Michael Baggesen Klitgaard present findings from data on party programmes going back to 1945. Their research indicates that, contrary to expectations, parties in government are more likely to alter their programme than parties in opposition, but that this effect depends on the extent to which parties aspire to hold office in the next election

Donald Trump’s support comes from two distinct groups:authoritarians who oppose immigration and anti-establishmentvoters

Are Donald Trump’s supporters authoritarian, anti-establishment, or both? In new research into who supports The Donald, Bert Bakker, Matthijs Rooduijn and Gijs Schumacher find that Trump’s supporters are those who score low on the personality trait of agreeableness (they are more likely to support politicians who criticize the establishment), and those who are more authoritarian (they are more likely to vote for politicians who push for more restrictive immigration policies). They also find that Trump’s authoritarian supporters are likely to support other Republicans who are restrictive on the issue of immigration, such as House Speaker Paul Ryan, while the low agreeable are dismissive of such establishment figures

Explaining the salience of anti-elitism and reducing political corruption for political parties in Europe with the 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey data

This article addresses the variation of anti-corruption and anti-elite salience in party positioning across Europe. It demonstrates that while anti-corruption salience is primarily related to the (regional) context in which a party operates, anti-elite salience is primarily a function of party ideology. Extreme left and extreme conservative (TAN) parties are significantly more likely to emphasize anti-elite views. Through its use of the new 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey wave, this article also introduces the dataset

Spintronics: Fundamentals and applications

Spintronics, or spin electronics, involves the study of active control and manipulation of spin degrees of freedom in solid-state systems. This article reviews the current status of this subject, including both recent advances and well-established results. The primary focus is on the basic physical principles underlying the generation of carrier spin polarization, spin dynamics, and spin-polarized transport in semiconductors and metals. Spin transport differs from charge transport in that spin is a nonconserved quantity in solids due to spin-orbit and hyperfine coupling. The authors discuss in detail spin decoherence mechanisms in metals and semiconductors. Various theories of spin injection and spin-polarized transport are applied to hybrid structures relevant to spin-based devices and fundamental studies of materials properties. Experimental work is reviewed with the emphasis on projected applications, in which external electric and magnetic fields and illumination by light will be used to control spin and charge dynamics to create new functionalities not feasible or ineffective with conventional electronics.Comment: invited review, 36 figures, 900+ references; minor stylistic changes from the published versio

Why Parties Narrow their Representative Profile: Evidence from Six European Democracies

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer Verlag via the DOI in this recordIn this paper, we analyse the conditions under which political parties narrow their representative profile (defined by the scope of the issues or the constituencies they represent). This strategy has been neglected in the party literature, which is mainly focused on the adoption of catch-all strategies among mainstream parties or the tendency to stick to core issues among niche parties. In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework that includes central external and internal drivers of party change and we empirically test this framework using novel survey data covering 121 parties across six European democracies: The United Kingdom, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Ireland.European Commissio

When does the Left do the Right thing?:A study of party position change on welfare policies

Why did pro-welfare Social Democrats and Christian Democrats cease to support the welfare state in the 1980s and 1990s, and support measures such as tighter welfare programme conditionality rules and lower social security benefits instead? Building on the party position change literature, I argue and empirically demonstrate that parties with an activist-dominated party organization adapt their position to shifts in the party voter position. Parties with a leadership-dominated party organization adapt their position to shifts in the median voter position. Parties in which neither leaders nor activists dictate party policy shift in the opposite direction of the previous policy shift if they are excluded from office. Using a cross-sectional time-series regression analysis of 181 position shifts of European Socialist, Social Democratic and Christian Democratic parties in the period 1977-2003, I find strong evidence that party organization is a crucial mediating variable in explaining when these parties shift to the right or left. Demonstrating that differences in party organizations motivate parties to respond to different incentives, this study has implications for the relationship between party behaviour and welfare state policy-making