Explore the vast range of titles available.

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.

About a decade ago, a study documented that conservatives have stronger physiological responses to threatening stimuli than liberals. This work launched an approach aimed at uncovering the biological roots of ideology. Despite wide-ranging scientific and popular impact, independent laboratories have not replicated the study. We conducted a pre-registered direct replication ( n  = 202) and conceptual replications in the United States ( n  = 352) and the Netherlands ( n  = 81). Our analyses do not support the conclusions of the original study, nor do we find evidence for broader claims regarding the effect of disgust and the existence of a physiological trait. Rather than studying unconscious responses as the real predispositions, alignment between conscious and unconscious responses promises deeper insights into the emotional roots of ideology. A previous study reported that conservatives have stronger physiological responses to threatening stimuli than liberals. A new study from the United States ( n  = 202 and 352) and the Netherlands ( n  = 81) does not support the conclusions of the original work.

What motivates parties to change their positions? Earlier studies demonstrate that parties change their position in response to environmental incentives, such as voter shifts. Yet, this work also suggests that parties differ in their responses. What accounts for this variation? We argue and empirically substantiate that differences in party organization explain the divergent responses of parties to environmental incentives. By means of a pooled time-series analysis of 55 parties in 10 European democracies between 1977 and 2003, this study demonstrates how the party organizational balance-of-power between party activists and party leaders conditions the extent to which environmental incentives (mean voter change, party voter change, and office exclusion) drive party-position change. The study’s findings have important implications for our understanding of parties’ electoral strategies as well as for models of representation.

There is some evidence that liberal politicians use more complex language than conservative politicians. This evidence, however, is based on a specific set of speeches of US members of Congress and UK members of Parliament. This raises the question whether the relationship between ideology and linguistic complexity is a more general phenomenon or specific to this small group of politicians. To address this question, this paper analyzes 381,609 speeches given by politicians from five parliaments, by twelve European prime ministers, as well as speeches from party congresses over time and across countries. Our results replicate and generalize earlier findings: speakers from culturally liberal parties use more complex language than speakers from culturally conservative parties. Economic left-right differences, on the other hand, are not systematically linked to linguistic complexity.

The policy positions parties choose are central to both attracting voters and forming coalition governments. How then should parties choose positions to best represent voters? Laver and Sergenti show that in an agent-based model with boundedly rational actors a decision rule (Aggregator) that takes the mean policy position of its supporters is the best rule to achieve high congruence between voter preferences and party positions. But this result only pertains to representation by the legislature, not representation by the government. To evaluate this we add a coalition formation procedure with boundedly rational parties to the Laver and Sergenti model of party competition. We also add two new decision rules that are sensitive to government formation outcomes rather than voter positions. We develop two simulations: a single-rule one in which parties with the same rule compete and an evolutionary simulation in which parties with different rules compete. In these simulations we analyze party behavior under a large number of different parameters that describe real-world variance in political parties' motives and party system characteristics. Our most important conclusion is that Aggregators also produce the best match between government policy and voter preferences. Moreover, even though citizens often frown upon politicians' interest in the prestige and rents that come with winning political office (office pay-offs), we find that citizens actually receive better representation by the government if politicians are motivated by these office pay-offs in contrast to politicians with ideological motivations (policy pay-offs). Finally, we show that while more parties are linked to better political representation, how parties choose policy positions affects political representation as well. Overall, we conclude that to understand variation in the quality of political representation scholars should look beyond electoral systems and take into account variation in party behavior as well.

Do politicians demand change if party support is slipping in opinion polls? If so, should a party change its program or just the way it communicates with voters? To investigate this, we conducted a survey experiment with 1236 Swedish politicians. We exposed them to a frame in which their party was losing in the polls, or a frame in which their party was gaining in the polls without using deception. Our results demonstrate that losing politicians seek change, both in terms of program and communication. However, the effects of the most recent polls are typically stronger than our experimental treatment. Along those lines we also find that politicians who are losing in recent polls, but not in our experimental treatment, favor ideological radicalization more than moderation or staying put. With these results our study paper speaks to the discussion on how representation is achieved and whether opinion polls are good or bad for democracy.

What explains the variation in tone in politics? Different literatures argue that changes in the tone of politicians reflect changes in the economy, general language, well-being, or ideology. So far, these claims have been empirically tested only in isolation, in single country studies, or with a small subset of indicators. We offer an overarching view by modelling the use of tone in European national parliaments in 7 countries across 30 years. Using a semi-supervised sentiment-topic model to measure polarity and arousal in legislative debates, we show in a preregistered multiverse analysis that the tone in legislative debates is not systematically related to previously claimed factors. We also replicate the absence of such systematic relationships using national leader speeches and parties’ election manifestos. There is also no universal trend towards more negativity or emotionality in political language. Overall, our results highlight the importance of multi-lingual and cross-country multiverse analyses for generalizing findings on emotions in politics.

Automated text analysis allows researchers to analyze large quantities of text. Yet, comparative researchers are presented with a big challenge: across countries people speak different languages. To address this issue, some analysts have suggested using Google Translate to convert all texts into English before starting the analysis (Lucas et al. 2015). But in doing so, do we get lost in translation? This paper evaluates the usefulness of machine translation for bag-of-words models—such as topic models. We use the europarl dataset and compare term-document matrices (TDMs) as well as topic model results from gold standard translated text and machine-translated text. We evaluate results at both the document and the corpus level. We first find TDMs for both text corpora to be highly similar, with minor differences across languages. What is more, we find considerable overlap in the set of features generated from human-translated and machine-translated texts. With regard to LDA topic models, we find topical prevalence and topical content to be highly similar with again only small differences across languages. We conclude that Google Translate is a useful tool for comparative researchers when using bag-of-words text models.

The negativity bias hypothesis in political communication contends that people are more aroused by negative vs. positive news. Soroka et al. (2019) provide evidence for this negativity bias in a study in 17 countries across six continents. We find suggestive evidence for Soroka et al.’s (2019) central finding that negativity causes an increase in skin conductance levels in a conceptually close, well-powered, and preregistered replication. We extend Soroka et al. (2019) in three ways. First, we theorise, test, and confirm that negative (vs. positive) news causes an increase in activity of the corrugator major muscle above the eyebrow (using facial electromyography activity) and is associated with a negative affect. Second, we find people self-reporting negative news causes negative affect but that positive (instead of negative) news increases self-reported arousal. Third, we test Soroka et al.’s (2019) argument in another context, the Netherlands. Our article suggests that negative news is, especially, causing negative affect. Doing so, we contribute to the negativity bias argument in political communication research and, at the same time, show the importance of replication in empirical communication research.

We present a new dataset of speeches given by Danish and Dutch politicians at party congresses between 1946 and 2017. The dataset is a unique collection of materials from different party archives and digital repositories. It offers a unique opportunity to analyse the issues discussed in these speeches, the positions taken and the rhetoric used by party elites over time and between countries. We describe the data and illustrate them with one application: a sentiment analysis that describes differences between parties and over time.