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Ideological polarization between political parties is essential for meaningful electoral competition, but at its extreme can strain democratic functioning. Despite a widespread recognition that multiple divides structure contemporary party polarization in Europe, its prevailing conceptualization and measurement remain one-dimensional. To resolve this tension, we introduce a novel, multidimensional approach to party polarization. Our main focus is on whether different ideological divides reinforce or crosscut each other. We calculate the effective dimensionality of a policy space using the correlation matrix of parties’ positions, which accounts for how the dimensions interrelate. Using both artificial data and positional estimates from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (1999–2019), we highlight the advantages of our approach and demonstrate that it is better able to capture the relationship between party polarization and mass partisanship. This study has important theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications for our understanding of polarization and democratic representation in a changing political landscape.

We explore the impact of prosocial orientations on a domain of American public opinion that has puzzled many-attitudes toward social welfare policies. We focus on the orientation of humanitarianism, i.e., a sense of obligation to help those in need, and find that this value can explain support for a wide variety of social welfare policies. We argue that humanitarianism is an important element of the American sociopolitical ethos, although it has received little attention in the public opinion literature. We contrast humanitarianism with egalitarianism and show that these dispositions lead people to support distinctive sets of policies that constitute different types of welfare state. While egalitarianism causes people to embrace policies that mandate an extensive economic role for the government, humanitarianism is associated with more modest policies that seek to address the problems of the needy. Support for these more modest policies has generally been much greater in the United States than support for more invasive policies that seek to tinker with the free market. Thus, we argue that humanitarianism provides a better explanation for public opinion toward welfare in the United States than egalitarianism. We discuss the implications of these findings for public opinion research.

In latent scaling applications, such as the positioning of political parties, differential item functioning (DIF) may occur because of measurement issues or because of substantive differences in the association between latent and manifest variables. While the first source of DIF has received considerable attention, the second has not, although it is of potential interest to comparative scholars. In this research note, we introduce a novel hierarchical Bayesian item response model that allows us to disentangle different sources of DIF. Drawing on the 2019 Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES), we highlight how the same issues are unequally politicized across Western Europe, and how some issues are less ideologically determined than others. Our model can be adapted to alternate settings, allowing researchers to shine a light on variation in, e.g., ideology, issue politicization, or party competition.

Multilevel data are structures that consist of multiple units of analysis, one nested within the other. Such data are becoming quite common in political science and provide numerous opportunities for theory testing and development. Unfortunately, this type of data typically generates a number of statistical problems, of which clustering is particularly important. To exploit the opportunities offered by multilevel data, and to solve the statistical problems inherent in them, special statistical techniques are required. In this article, we focus on a technique that has become popular in educational statistics and sociology-multilevel analysis. In multilevel analysis, researchers build models that capture the layered structure of multilevel data, and determine how layers interact and impact a dependent variable of interest. Our objective in this article is to introduce the logic and statistical theory behind multilevel models, to illustrate how such models can be applied fruitfully in political science, and to call attention to some of the pitfalls in multilevel analysis.

We find strong support for an on-line model of the candidate evaluation process that in contrast to memory-based models shows that citizens are responsive to campaign information, adjusting their overall evaluation of the candidates in response to their immediate assessment of campaign messages and events. Over time people forget most of the campaign information they are exposed to but are nonetheless able to later recollect their summary affective evaluation of candidates which they then use to inform their preferences and vote choice. These findings have substantive, methodological, and normative implications for the study of electoral behavior. Substantively, we show how campaign information affects voting behavior. Methodologically, we demonstrate the need to measure directly what campaign information people actually attend to over the course of a campaign and show that after controling for the individual's on-line assessment of campaign messages, National Election Study-type recall measures prove to be spurious as explanatory variables. Finally, we draw normative implications for democratic theory of on-line processing, concluding that citizens appear to be far more responsive to campaign messages than conventional recall models suggest.

We present a model of deliberative inclusion, focusing on reciprocity in the interaction between structural minorities/disadvantaged groups and majorities/privileged groups. Our model, however, comes with a ‘friendly amendment’: we have put the ‘burden of reciprocity’ mainly on majorities and privileged groups. It is mainly their obligation to seriously listen and respond to the demands and arguments of minorities and disadvantaged groups and show a willingness to respect and accommodate these interests. Empirically, we apply our model to the interaction of linguistic groups in the Swiss parliament. We find a highly egalitarian, sometimes even minority-favoring mode of interaction between the German-speaking majority and linguistic minorities. The German-speaking majority seems to be willing to take the ‘burden of reciprocity’ when linguistic minorities’ vital interests are concerned. Conversely, linguistic minorities are slightly more self-referential and adversarial under such conditions.

Over the past half-century, Europe has experienced the most radical reallocation of authority that has ever taken place in peace-time. This 2004 volume brings together a formidable group of scholars of European and comparative politics to investigate the new patterns of political conflict that are arising in the European Union.

In this paper, we develop a discourse quality index (DQI) that serves as a quantitative measure of discourse in deliberation. The DQI is rooted in Habermas' discourse ethics and provides an accurate representation of the most important principles underlying deliberation. At the same time, the DQI can be shown to be a reliable measurement instrument due to its focus on observable behavior and its detailed coding instructions. We illustrate the DQI for a parliamentary debate in the British House of Commons. We show that the DQI yields reliable data and we discuss how these data could be used in subsequent analysis. We conclude by discussing some limitations of the DQI and by identifying some areas in which it could prove useful.

Past research suggests that beliefs and emotions operate as partially distinct determinants of political attitudes. In addition, while positive and negative beliefs about a political object are bipolar in structure, positive and negative emotions have been demonstrated to be relatively independent. In this past research, beliefs and emotions have been assessed with different measures. Yet current models of survey responding suggest that responses to survey items are often influenced by the manner in which the researcher poses the questions. As such, it is not clear whether the uniqueness of these belief and emotion measures reflects a bona fide difference between two underlying constructs, or merely an artifactual difference induced by differing methods of measurement. In this study, beliefs and emotions are shown to operate as partially unique predictors of candidate evaluation even when employing corresponding methods of measurement. The independence of positive and negative emotion, however, only arises when employing a dichotomous measure. When employing ordinal measures, positive and negative emotions contain a substantial component of bipolarity. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Our research project addressed two questions: (1) are there favorable contexts for deliberation in legislatures? and (2) does deliberation also matter for outcomes? We found that consensus institutions, presidentialism, second chambers, non-publicity, and low-issue polarization further deliberation, particularly by enhancing respectful exchanges among participants. We also found that unanimous or nearly unanimous decisions were typically associated with high-quality deliberation in the preceding debates, while deliberation was almost without any effect on the substantive outcome dimension (conceptualized as more and or less egalitarian decisions). Reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd