Contentious politics and policy congruence: how French society responds to Muslims

Issues surrounding Muslims have become a prominent feature of French politics. Drawing on a new study, Steven M. Van Hauwaert and Manlio Cinalli present a novel measure of how views toward Muslims have changed within France, and how government policies have responded to these shifts in public opinion

Belgium : Against the Government and Its Parties, (Not So Much) with the People

We are grateful to Tim Bale, Sarah de Lange, Marcel Lewandowski, and Marta Lorimer as well as the editors for their insightful comments on previous versions of this chapter.Publisher PD

Evidence from France: the impact of terrorism on representative democracy

How do citizens respond to terrorist events? Drawing on a recent study, Steven M. Van Hauwaert and Robert A. Huber find that citizens do not necessarily respond in the way we might expect. Citizens do not increase hostility toward ‘out-groups’ as a direct response to terrorism, rather they increase solidarity within their ‘in-group’ and come together following an exogenous shock

Populist party supporters: informed, uninformed or misinformed?

Supporters of populist parties are often portrayed as politically naïve or misinformed, but to what extent does this image reflect reality? Drawing on a new study, Stijn van Kessel, Javier Sajuria and Steven M. Van Hauwaert present evidence that populist party supporters are not less informed than supporters of other parties. However, supporters of right-wing populist parties had a greater tendency to give incorrect answers to political knowledge questions, suggesting there are key differences between the characteristics of left-wing and right-wing populist voters

Beyond protest and discontent. A cross-national analysis of the effect of populist attitudes and issue positions on populist party support

Even though studies of supply-side populism are numerous, its connection with demand-side dynamics, and particularly the populist characteristics or tendencies of the electorate, requires more scholarly attention. We seek to examine in more detail the conditions underlying the support for populist parties, and in particular the role of populist attitudes amongst citizens. We ask two core questions: (i) to what extent are populist party supporters characterised by populist attitudes, and (ii) to what extent do populist (and other) attitudes contribute to their party preference? For the analysis, we use fixed-effect models and rely on a cross-sectional research design that uses unique survey data from 2015 and includes nine European countries. Our results are threefold. First, in line with single-country studies, we conclude that populist attitudes are prominent amongst supporters of left- and right-wing populist parties in particular. Second, populist attitudes are important predictors of populist party support, in addition to left-wing socio-economic issue positions for left-wing populist parties, and authoritarian and anti-immigration issue positions for right-wing populist parties. Third, we find that populist attitudes moderate the effect of issue positions on the support for populist parties, particularly for individuals whose positions are further removed from the extreme ends of the economic or cultural policy scale. These findings suggest that strong populist attitudes may encourage some voters to support a populist party whose issue positions are incongruous with their own policy-related preferences

An initial profile of the ideologically volatile voter in Europe: The multidimensional role of party attachment and the conditionality of the political system

Since the "defreezing" of traditional cleavages and the following dealignment, electoral volatility has been an important field of study. Notwithstanding the often aggregate-level analysis of electoral volatility, this study introduces the notion of ideological volatility to indicate an individual-level shift in vote decision between ideological blocks, thereby complementing the more common study of partisan volatility. Using CSES data, this study examines ideological volatility in 28 European elections between 2001 and 2011. Using a set of multilevel models, the analysis specifically confirms the conditionality of party attachment (dichotomous) and its dependency on the political system when explaining ideological volatility. The effect of party attachment on the likelihood to become ideologically volatile is more substantial when a political system is more diversified

Regional-level immigration opinions dataset

For the moment, the project collects regional-level immigration opinions data for three countries, namely Belgium, France and Great Britain. The operationalisation of ‘regions’ largely corresponds to the NUTS 1 scheme designed by the European Union. More specifically, - Belgium: Brussels, Flanders and Wallonia. - France: Nord, Bassin Parisien, Île-de-France, Est, Ouest, Centre-Est, Sud-Ouest and Méditerranée. - Great Britain: North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Humber, East Midlands, West Midlands, East of England, London, South East, South West, Scotland, Wales and Northern Irelan

Replication Data for: Responsiveness and the macro-origins of immigration opinions: evidence from Belgium, France and the UK.

Replication Data for: Responsiveness and the macro-origins of immigration opinions: evidence from Belgium, France and the UK

A multi-dimensional analysis of political participation and gender in Europe: The importance of context as a conditioning effect for participatory gender inequalities

Participatory gender inequalities have long been a field of study. We distinguish between institutional and non-institutional forms of political participation, while we further analyse the multidimensionality of gender differences within both. We focus on the role of context and we argue that different interpretations of context can affect the conditionality of the relationship between gender and political participation. To further explore these inequalities throughout Europe, we ask three distinct questions. To what extent do participatory gender inequalities show crosscountry patterns of variation? Which contextual variables affect participatory inequality across gender lines and how can we describe their influence? To what extent is the rapport between participatory gender inequalities and contextual variables different according to the form of political participation? Our analysis – based on a multilevel model and ESS data – indicates that while favourable economic, political and social factors reduce participatory gender inequalities, they only do so for non-institutional participatory gender inequalities. Overall, we confirm the multi-dimensionality of participatory gender differences, as well as the importance of context as a conditioning effect

Polarization Between the Rich and the Poor? The Dynamics and Structure of Redistributive Preferences in a Comparative Perspective

Citizens’ support for redistribution varies largely between and within countries. An important empirical challenge in this field is the scarcity of comparative data, whichthis study overcomes by designing a novel time-series cross-sectional dataset that spans more than three decades in seven European countries. Using nearly 300 surveys and a dyadic ratios algorithm, we estimate aggregate redistributive preferences for each country, as well as for population strata within countries based on household income. We then ask to what extent support for redistribution varies across the rich and the poor. We find that citizens are not systematically becoming more reluctant toward or more supportive of redistribution. While redistributive preferences of the rich and the poor do not strictly move in parallel, there is no polarization between the two. Moreover, both the demand for redistribution and the preference gap between the rich and the poor evolve in a cyclical way