Jochem Vanagt and Markus Kollberg show that coalition governments bring voters of different parties closer together only if people believe those coalitions are doing a good job. When voters think coalitions are performing badly, partisan hostility remains high. Their insights have significant implications for efforts to reduce affective polarisation
Democratic governments conduct extensive public opinion research, but we know little about how they use it. When and why do they seek to find out what the public thinks? Opening the black box of government polling in Germany, Anja Durovic and Tinette Schnatterer find governments exploit polls in a highly strategic way.
During the first wave of Covid-19, the UK government showed a chart plotting the country's mortalities against other high-income countries. They kept on showing it, until it revealed the UK to be the worst in Europe, at which point the slide disappeared. William Allen and Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij argue that visual comparisons are an important lever through which politicians and media can change public perceptions
Jan Philipp Thomeczek argues that European left-wing populist parties become more moderate as a consequence of their participation in government. Here, he draws on recent examples from Spain, Greece and Germany.
Little by little, scholarship on populism and public policy and administration has shown that populists in government cause significant damage to government institutions and policy processes. Mauricio I. Dussauge-Laguna argues that Mexico’s experience under president López Obrador reinforces these findings and adds fresh (if discouraging) evidence to the argument
The 2023 Dutch general election has given Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom a landslide victory. Iris Beau Segers argues that centre-right parties have contributed to the mainstreaming of Wilders’ far-right views and are now trapped in a dance over the formation of a new government
The presence of populist governments in European Union policy-making has been largely ignored. Ariadna Ripoll Servent and Natascha Zaun argue that we should pay attention to populists’ behaviour in the Council of the EU. Populist governments do not play by the normal rules of the game; rather, they use ‘unpolitics’. This destructive approach to policy-making was instrumental in blocking a reform of EU migration politics
Populists have risen to executive office worldwide. In this context, Michael W. Bauer argues, we must pay more systematic attention to threats to the state and its institutions; the potential long-term impacts of the damage that populist governments can inflict 'from within' are potentially devastating
Nick Vlahos argues that to fully animate the data mountain that Jean-Paul Gagnon has amassed about the plurality and interrelation of democratic adjectives and forms, we must capture the way in which these variegated types of democracy enclose and open how the public can collectively govern
As student governments experience decline and collapse in the twenty-first century, their importance in contemporary political life should not be underestimated. They serve as valuable resources for political scientists looking to understand democracy at fundamental levels. Justin Patrick argues that we should take them seriously in research and practice
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