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The article presents news briefs on political science, political parties, practical politics, elections, and the cabinet system in Finland under Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen. Leehna Luhtanen is Minister of Justice while Susanna Huovinen is Minister of Transport and Communication. Strikes and lockouts in the pulp and paper industry dominated presidential campaigns.

Recent analyses have demonstrated that personality affects political behavior. According to the mediation hypothesis, the effect of personality on political participation is mediated by classical predictors, such as political interest, internal efficacy, political discussion, or the sense that voting is a civic duty. This paper outlines various paths that link personality traits to two participatory activities: voter turnout in European Parliament elections and participation in protest actions. The hypotheses are tested with data from a large, nationally representative, face-to-face survey of the Spanish population conducted before and after the 2009 European Parliament elections using log-linear path models that are well suited to study indirect relationships. The results clearly confirm that the effects of personality traits on voter turnout and protest participation are sizeable but indirect. They are mediated by attitudinal predictors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the notion of Europeanization of political communication and the possible development of a European public sphere is explored. The article offers a concrete approach to investigating this notion with direct reference to the Internet. Specifically, I examine the unfolding of communicative interaction on the Web sites of French political parties in the context of the 2004 European Parliament election. Through their Web sites, parties offer a particular perspective on European news, issues and events, suggesting whether and why discrete issues broadly concerning Europe are (or should be) socially and politically relevant. Three interpretative frames, derived from theory, are examined in the paper: interests, identity and values. It was found that the three frames coexist in various sections of the Web sites within the French sample. Specifically, European interests and identity are usually expressed in combination with national interests and values. Universal values are frequently expressed, both in relation to France and the EU. Overall, the findings point to a general 'feeling of belonging to Europe' among a number of the French political parties included in the sample. These parties did, to a degree, communicate from a 'Europeanized' perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Spatial models of issue voting generally assume that citizens have a single “vote function”. A given voter is expected to evaluate all parties using the same issue criteria. The impact of issues can vary between citizens and contexts, but is normally considered to be constant across parties. This paper reassesses this central assumption, by suggesting that party characteristics influence the salience of issue considerations in voters' evaluations. Voters should rely more strongly on issues which are frequently associated with a given party and for which its issue stances are better known. Our analysis of the 2014 European elections supports these hypotheses by showing that the impact of voter-party issue distances on party evaluations is systematically related to the clarity and extremism of parties' issue positions, as well as to their size and governmental status. These findings imply an important modification of standard proximity models of electoral competition and party preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years it has become increasingly difficult to maintain that the European party systems are stable and that they reflect the societal cleavage structures of the past. One developmental aspect of the party systems is singled out for description and analysis in this paper. It is argued that European party systems in terms of electoral volatility, i.e., rates of net change in the electorates, are drifting away from each other. Some of the party systems which have traditionally been considered volatile, apparently are becoming less so, while some other systems are taking on the character of highly volatile party systems. A simple set of hypotheses, based upon the notion of party space, is proposed in order to account for the variation observed. The data lend support to the hypothesis that electoral volatility is a function of the format of the party system and of short-term changes in that format. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At first sight, the electoral systems in Denmark, Germany, South Africa and Sweden may seem different and an attempt to categorize them together odd. All four, however, belong to the same category, which Arend Lijphart calls 'proportional representation two-tier districting systems', and the effects of these systems on the proportionality of the representation of political parties are, indeed, comparable. The four electoral systems were the basis of their countries' general elections during 1994. The results of these elections are used for analyses and discussions of the relative importance of the differences which one also finds between them. The paper ends with an examination of the behavioural consequences of these institutional arrangements, which are also found elsewhere, i.e. in Estonia, Iceland, Norway and New Zealand (in the new electoral system currently being implemented there). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article starts from the observation that most voters know relatively little about positions and plans of political parties, especially when European Union politics is concerned. One reason for this could be that the main sources for political information, party communication and mass media coverage, provide voters only little concrete information about positions and plans of political parties. We ask how concretely, respectively vaguely, political parties and mass media communicate political positions prior to the 2014 European Parliament elections. We conducted a quantitative content analysis of all European Union–related press releases from 46 national political parties and of all European Union–related articles of 14 national quality newspapers from 7 European countries 12 weeks before the 2014 European Parliament elections. Our analysis shows that press releases as well as media coverage contain more concrete political positions on European Union issues than vague political statements. Other than expected, newspaper coverage provided the public with less concrete information than political actors did. Nevertheless, countries vary with regard to the extent to which party communication or newspaper coverage contain vague statements. We cannot find empirical support that the communication of concrete political positions depends on a party's "extremity" of issue position or on the type of issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Parliament's increased legislative role in recent years means that its actions are now more likely to have an impact on national parties' policy choices and, indirectly, on their electoral-fortunes. This article examines the extent to which national party delegations deal with this by ensuring representativeness among their committee contingents. Using a technique borrowed from Cox and Mc-Cubbins (1993), the article compares the voting behaviour of committee contingents with their national party delegations on the basis of roll-call votes. The analysis shows that, for the most part, national parties ensure higher levels of representativeness on committees that have legislative power. The results support the assertion that, as the European Parliament's actions matter more, national parties have become more concerned with their MEPs' activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of majoritarian and proportional electoral rules on politics have been broadly examined in the literature but cross-national studies have failed to appropriately include mixed systems in institutional analyses. This paper develops a theoretical argument about the consequences of the new type of electoral rules as compared to the two older "pure" systems. Multivariate regression analysis of data from sixteen East European countries is used to test the main hypotheses about the relative effect of mixed systems and the importance of their specific design. The results suggest that the East European mixed systems have contributed to the election of fewer bigger winners which could stimulate the evolution of moderately fragmented party systems. The findings show that there are effective mechanisms available to electoral engineers to shape parliamentary majorities under mixed rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The June 1999 elections to the European Parliament were the fourth to show lower turnout, suggesting to some a decline in support for the European project. This paper shows, however, that turnout decline has been built into the EC/EU enlargement process. In the first EP elections, voting was compulsory in 40% of participating countries; but no more compulsory voting countries have joined the EC/EU, so the effects of this variable have become increasingly diluted. An even more important factor has been the boost to turnout that new member countries generally enjoy at their first EP election. The loss of this boost in subsequent elections joins with the declining proportion of compulsory voting countries to explain virtually all the decline in turnout at EP elections since 1979. This finding emphasizes the importance of keeping track of the changing composition of the entity being studied when trying to understand electoral change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commercially motivated junk news–i.e. money-driven, highly shareable clickbait with low journalistic production standards–constitutes a vast and largely unexplored news media ecosystem. Using publicly available Facebook data, we compared the reach of junk news on Facebook pages in the Netherlands to the reach of Dutch mainstream news on Facebook. During the period 2013–2017 the total number of user interactions with junk news significantly exceeded that with mainstream news. Over 5 Million of the 10 Million Dutch Facebook users have interacted with a junk news post at least once. Junk news Facebook pages also had a significantly stronger increase in the number of user interactions over time than mainstream news. Since the beginning of 2016 the average number of user interactions per junk news post has consistently exceeded the average number of user interactions per mainstream news post. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, an increasing number of democracies have adopted a runoff rule to elect their president. Some have argued, however, that the benefits of such a rule are dubious at best. In this article, I seek to counter this claim, as I posit that a runoff rule promotes the protection of human rights by reducing outcomes that are negatively associated with high government respect for human rights. Using ordered logistic regression and an analysis of predicted probabilities, I find that democratic presidential elections held using a runoff rule produce presidents that are less likely to be associated with lower government respect for human rights, and more likely to be associated with greater government respect for human rights. I conclude by suggesting that politicians should consider embracing a presidential runoff rule, as its adoption could be a relatively easy way to reduce repression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The huge inflow of asylum seekers to European countries in the early 1990s drove those countries to initiate policies that restricted asylum seekers' rights and benefits. Were these policies spontaneous responses to the mounting inflow or instead political outcomes determined by political factors such as partisanship and election timing? Analyzing data on the introduction of policies that restricted asylum seekers' welfare benefits and rights in 13 European countries from 1981 to 2000, this article finds that upcoming elections increase the likelihood of policy introduction. This election effect is greater in the presence of right-wing parties. These results imply that policies regarding asylum seekers' welfare benefits have been utilized by right-wing parties for electoral purposes. Therefore, these policies should be understood as the outcome of political choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do political actors communicate effectively during electoral campaigns? We introduce a novel concept in electoral research, the “perceived effectiveness of political parties' election campaigns.” This evaluation concentrates on the extent to which a party is seen as getting its message across to the voter. Empirical analyses using survey data and a media content analysis during the 2009 European Parliamentary elections show that the more exposed to news about a particular party, the more a voter feels that this party gets its message across. A party's perceived campaign effectiveness is greater when one or two other parties are also mentioned in a particular news item, which may make the party's profile more pronounced. Furthermore, the greater a voter's interest in the campaign, the larger the effect of exposure on party evaluations. The article concludes by discussing party evaluations and campaign effectiveness in the light of our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The literature on party organisational change emphasises environmental factors as well as internal circumstances. The literature on Europeanisation and political parties privileges the EU as a key environmental factor in terms of change. This article combines insights from the party organisation and Europeanisation literatures in order to more precisely conceptualise the EU as a stimulus and therefore causal factor in party organisational change. Two types of party change are analysed, new party positions (MEPs and specialised EU party staff) and party leaderships' responses to internal dissent over the EU. Linking a specific form of EU stimulus to a particular party goal helps to explain certain types of change, while inter-governmental bargaining may produce uncertainty for domestic political actors thereby inducing defensive reactions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A basic level of trust in the political system is considered to be the cornerstone of modern-day democracy. Consequently, scholars and politicians have been concerned with low or declining levels of trust in political institutions. This article focuses on trust in parliament. Many theories have been offered to explain cross-national differences or longitudinal changes in trust, but they have not been subject to systematic empirical tests. This article aims to fill that theoretical and empirical gap. I conceptualize trust in parliament as citizens' rather rational evaluations of the state-citizen relationship along four dimensions: competence, intrinsic care, accountability, and reliability. Next, I relate state characteristics to each of these four aspects, and hypothesize how they might affect political trust. These hypotheses are tested simultaneously by multi-level analysis on stapled data from the European Social Survey 2002-06. The tests show that three factors explain very well the cross-national differences in trust: corruption, the electoral system, and former regime type. Somewhat surprisingly, economic performance is not related to trust in parliament. Although the analyses do not explain changes in trust across time very well, they at least dismiss some of the existing explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political scientists have long debated whether “issues” influence vote choices. It is now generally agreed, however, that policy preferences and evaluations of party performance have some limited impact on vote decisions. It has also been shown that the influence of issues varies both between individuals and between elections. This article adds to our understanding of these issues by examining how the European issue influenced individual vote decisions at each general election since 1974. We use Manifesto Research Group (MRG) data to show that the effect of Europe on individual vote decisions increases as the parties became more polarized and decreases as they converge on the European issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tony Travers analyses the outcome of the 2009 local and European elections – contrasting the difference between first past the post and proportional representation-based results – and predicts trouble for Labour, whose support, he argues, has been reduced to its core vote [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article centres on the saliency that regional decentralization has had for British, Italian and French political parties in the past 60 years. A longitudinal analysis of the emphasis that parties have assigned to this issue in their manifestos confirms the hypothesis that certain environmental factors influence the changes of attention of parties on regionalization in their electoral discourse. Electoral threats and institutional reforms have a relevant impact and are mediated by the nature of party goals (policy-, vote- or office-seeking). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article presents news briefs on political science, political parties, practical politics, elections, and the cabinet system in Estonia under Prime Minister Andrus Ansip. Edgar Savisaar is Minister of the Interior, Minister of Education and Research, and Minister of Social Affairs. Control of the Defense and Foreign Ministries were retained by the Reform Party.

The article deals with the more theoretical conceptualization of models of democratic process and suggests that the increased use of referendums marks a tendency towards resorting to plebiscitary politics in the European integration project. It analyzes the French and Dutch referendum results, highlighting key differences between the arguments, forces, campaigns and no votes that reinforce both the importance of not treating them as indicative of common factors and the need to integrate effectively the study of domestic European political processes with European integration. It explores that this integrated approach poses for the study of contemporary Europe.

Proportionality profiles developed by Taagepera and Laakso have earlier been used for describing effects of national electoral systems. In this article we apply these profiles to European parliamentary (EP) elections of the EU15 from 1979 to 2004. Since the electoral systems of the EP elections closely resemble the national elections in the respective countries, same kind of profiles emerge as in the national elections. Therefore the members of the European parliament are chosen with many different electoral systems with different effects on the outcome. Six profiles types were found. Counting method seems to determine the profile grouping somewhat, but the strongest variables determining the shape of a countries profile appears to be the average district magnitude and the number of seats allocated to the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The composition of the directly elected European Parliament does not precisely reflect the 'real' balance of political forces in the European Community. As long as the national political systems decide most of what there is to be decided politically, and everything really important, European elections are additional national second-order elections. They are determined more by the domestic political cleavages than by alternatives originating in the EC, but in a different way than if nine first-order national elections took place simultaneously. This is the case because European elections occur at different stages of the national political systems' respective `electoral cycles'. Such a relationship between a second-order arena and the chief arena of a political system is not at all unusual. What is new here, is that one second-order political arena is related to nine different first-order arenas. A first analysis of European election results satisfactorily justifies the assumption that European Parliament direct elections should be treated as nine simultaneous national second-order elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]