Abstract Does candidate gender matter for vote choice? Whereas experimental research suggests an average preference for female candidates, observational studies tend to find null effects. In this note, we address the recent debate on how to measure voter preferences on the aggregate and the individual level. We argue that candidate gender preferences exist, but that whether and when they are revealed varies between and within voters. Drawing on an observational design and using data from over 500,000 individual ballots in Lithuanian elections, we employ multilevel regression and exponential ra ..read more

Abstract Party competition sometimes resembles an auction, where parties seek to ‘buy’ elections through promises of economic largesse. In this article, I argue that whether parties engage in this practice will depend on political circumstances, such as the level of ideological competition. Incentives to promise more to voters will also vary depending on a party's electoral prospects: for parties that expect a significant level of government responsibility, promising too much is a risky strategy. I test these arguments by focusing on the spending commitments in party manifestos from 20 countri ..read more

Abstract Coalition policymaking concerns not only who decides what in which jurisdiction but also when, how speedy and in what rhythm. Due to the limited time budget and shadow of future elections, parties in charge of respective ministerial portfolios have to strategically organize their policy agendas to trade off between policy and electoral incentives in the face of coalition partners who monitor and control ministerial autonomy. However, despite the burgeoning literature on coalition governance, the temporal dimension of ministerial agenda control is less well understood. I advance this r ..read more

Abstract Threat language is an important, albeit ambivalent, element of political crisis communication. It raises public awareness and enhances compliance with emergency measures, but, if overused, it also carries the risk of making governments appear overwhelmed by a crisis. Research on political communication during the COVID-19 pandemic has so far only produced very limited insights into the use of threat language by governments. To address this gap in the literature, our article analyses which factors influence the likelihood of threat language in the crisis communication of governments. W ..read more

Abstract A growing body of research theorizes that partisanship can undermine democracy as citizens prioritize their political interests over abstract norms and values. We argue that crises might counteract intense partisanship by giving citizens clarity on the threats posed by rule of law violations. Examining the differential application of a law – a breach of democratic norms – we draw on an experiment embedded in representative surveys of Germany, the United States, Hungary and Poland to examine citizens’ sense of appropriate punishment for elites’ violation of a municipal mask-wearing ord ..read more

Abstract This study presents the results from a series of conjoint experiments evaluating how the various components of political systems affect citizens’ satisfaction with democracy (SWD). Compared to earlier studies, our approach is unique in that we were able to disentangle the effects of otherwise highly collinear variables corresponding to three defining features of any political system, namely (1) access to power, (2) the policy-making process and (3) performance. We fielded identical conjoint experiments in countries with significant variations across the key independent variables: Fran ..read more

Abstract While cross-sectional research has consistently shown graduates are less Eurosceptic than non-graduates, little is known about the causal role of university study in determining these attitudes, as few longitudinal studies have explored this. This study does so, providing robust causal estimates of higher education's effect on Euroscepticism through applying individual- and sibling fixed-effect modelling techniques to British Household Panel and Understanding Society data from 1999–2022. Both specifications provide consistent results; suggesting university study does little to decreas ..read more

European Journal of Political Research, Volume 63, Issue 2, Page 407-409, May 2024 ..read more

Abstract This article analyses whether and how fairness considerations affect citizens’ support of European Union (EU) policies and integration. While past literature has revealed that perceptions of procedural and substantive fairness impact on public opinion at the level of the nation state, we know less about the fairness-support nexus when it comes to international cooperation. We here make use of the case of differentiated integration (DI) to experimentally dissect normative and utility-oriented considerations in the evaluation of EU policies. DI as an instrument to overcome heterogeneity ..read more

Abstract Do salient episodes of state violence affect citizens' willingness to pay taxes for different social purposes in the long run? In this article, I answer this question using an original dataset that geolocates individuals who were seriously injured during the anti-communist Romanian revolution of 1989. Using the number of casualties within different regions as a source of quasi-exogenous variation, I show that the places from which more casualties come have systematically lower levels of tax morale. I argue that these results arise because there has been no clear break with the authori ..read more