Commentary on: People search for meaning when they approach a new decade in chronological age

A commentary on People search for meaning when they approach a new decade in chronological age by Alter, A., and Hershfield, H. (2014). Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 111, 17066–17070. doi: 10.1073/pnas.141508611

Votes at 16: do mock elections make a difference to adults’ attitudes?

Mock elections help 16- and 17-year-olds understand how elections work. But do they make adults more likely to back lowering the voting age to 16? Erik Gahner Larsen, Klaus Levinsen and Ulrik Kjær looked at the 2009 local elections in Denmark, when a number of municipalities held mock elections alongside the real ones. They found that they did make over-18s more positive about votes at 16, though a stubborn core of older and more right-wing voters remained hostile to the idea

Asymmetric realignment: Immigration and right party voting

The second decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a significant 'rightward drift' as populists in the West scored striking electoral gains. We argue that this reflects a shift in the power of electoral cleavages that is asymmetric in nature. Specifically, voters for whom immigration is salient are more likely to switch to conservative and national populist parties than to liberal or left-wing parties. We leverage data from three prominent cases, the United States, Britain and Germany, to demonstrate that immigration-specific asymmetric realignment occurred in the three countries. These findings have implications for our understanding of electoral politics, populism and the emerging 'culture divide' in party systems

Transforming Stability into Change: How the Media Select and Report Opinion Polls

While political polls show stability over short periods of time, most media coverage of polls highlights recurrent changes in the political competition. We present evidence for a snowball effect where small and insignificant changes in polls end up in the media coverage as stories about changes. To demonstrate this process, we rely on the full population of political polls in Denmark and a combination of human coding and supervised machine learning of over 4,000 news articles. Through these steps we show how a horserace coverage of polls about change can rest on a foundation of stability

Hvilken periode skal analyseres? Uge 46 som dataindsamlingsstrategi i journalistikforskningen

Alle analyser af medieindhold skal forholde sig til et spørgsmål med væsentlige implikationer for analysens resultater: Hvilken periode skal analyseres? Flere videnskabelige undersøgelser har i den forbindelse anvendt uge 46 som en dataindsamlingsstrategi. I denne artikel placerer vi dette valg i en metodisk kontekst og ekspliciterer potentielle faldgruber forbundet med denne indsamlingsstrategi. Vi analyserer, om eksisterende studier, der anvender uge 46, undgår disse faldgruber, og introducerer praktiske retningslinjer for, hvordan forskere bedst besvarer spørgsmålet om, hvilken periode der skal analyseres, når man ønsker at undersøge indhold i medierne

Bailout or bust? Government evaluations in the wake of a bailout

Governments are often punished for negative events such as economic downturns and financial shocks. However, governments can address such shocks with salient policy responses that might mitigate public punishment. We use three high-quality nationally representative surveys collected around a key event in the history of the Dutch economy, namely the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008, to examine how voters responded to a salient government bailout. The results illustrate that governments can get substantial credit for pursuing a bailout in the midst of a financial crisis. Future research should take salient policy responses into account to fully understand the public response to the outbreak of financial and economic crises

Democracy for the youth? The impact of mock elections on voting age attitudes

Should 16-year-olds be entitled to participate in elections? We theorize that mock elections for adolescents, who are not eligible to vote, affect the short-term support among the general public for lowering the voting age. To test our theoretical expectation, we utilize variation among municipalities in the organization of mock elections during the Danish local elections in 2009. Difference-in-difference estimates with data from the subsequent local elections in 2013 demonstrate that citizens in municipalities with mock elections for adolescents were more supportive of lowering the voting age and that their support was strongly rooted in ideological differences

The Generalizability of Personality Effects in Politics

A burgeoning line of research examining the relation between personality traits and political variables relies extensively on convenience samples. However, our understanding of the extent to which using convenience samples challenges the generalizability of these findings to target populations remains limited. We address this question by testing whether associations between personality and political characteristics observed in representative samples diverged from those observed in the sub-populations most commonly studied in convenience samples, namely students and internet users. We leverage ten high-quality representative datasets to compare the representative samples with the two sub- samples. We did not find any systematic differences in the relationship between personality traits and a broad range of political variables. Instead, results from the sub-samples generalized well to those observed in the broader and more diverse representative sample