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The recent popularity of nationalist movements bears witness to the continued power of national feeling in politics. This article considers the potential relationship between different kinds of national attachments and what we call active and allegiant citizenship—support for democracy, community participation, and prosocial behavior. We analyze these relationships using data from two waves of the European Values Study. We find that a set of attachments often called civic nationalism—including patriotism, national identity, and respect for one's country's institutions—are connected with better citizenship on virtually all of our outcomes, whereas ethnic nationalism is frequently connected with worse citizenship. These associations, however, tend to be weaker in the postcommunist states which have a different experience with both nationalism and democracy. The results suggest that national feeling can be a double-edged sword for citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constitutions reflect national values and set out the foundational principles of governance. Traditionally, those values and principles have been male-defined. As such, constitutions often form the basis of the 'gendered state' with all its attendant inequities. Feminist constitutionalism challenges the wider domain of constitution-making to consider questions relating to gender inequality in constitutional debate, design and redesign. Through a case study approach, this article utilises a feminist lens to examine on-going constitutional debates in Northern Ireland that have been deepened by Brexit. Any new constitutional arrangements on the island of Ireland will drive multiple transformations in social, legal and economic life that will impact on the lives of women. Subsequently, this article explores the gender dynamics of current debates to contribute to the broader feminist literature on constitutional transitions in deeply divided societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the outcome of the 2001 and 2005 general elections, when the numbers of abstainers outweighed the numbers of Labour voters on both occasions, much attention has focused upon the state of British democracy and how to enthuse the electorate, especially young people. Whilst the government is exploring ways to make the whole process of voting easier, it may be failing to tackle the real problem – that youth appear to find the business of politics uninviting and irrelevant. This paper examines data derived from a nationwide survey of more than 700 young people in order to shed light on what lies at the heart of young people's apparent disengagement from formal politics in Britain – political apathy or a sense of political alienation. The findings reveal that they support the democratic process, but are sceptical of the way the British political system is organised and led and are turned off by politicians and the political parties. However, there is no uniform youth orientation to politics, and the data indicate that views differ according to social class, educational history and also gender. However both ethnicity and region of the country in which young people live seem to have little influence in structuring political attitudes and behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a preliminary attempt to evaluate changing patterns of democratic governance, at least in Westminster-style parliamentary settings, and possibly more generally. It has two specific purposes: first, to propose a paradigm for evaluating the empirical evolution of democratic governance; and second, to illustrate the explanatory potential of this paradigm through a mini-case study of changing patterns of governance in one particular polity. The conceptual framework is drawn from March and Olsen's eponymous study (1995) from which polar (‘thick’ and‘thin’) forms of democratic governance are derived. Four conjectures about its evolution are then explored. First, in its mass party phase, the pattern of democratic governance approximated the‘thick’ pole. Second, the subsequent evolution of democratic politics has been in the direction of the‘thin’ (minimalist or populist) pole. Third, the cause of this shift was a failure to adapt political institutions to changing citizen identities, which was masked by the ascendancy amongst political elites of the neo-liberal account of governance. Fourth, the paper considers the means by which democratic governance might be renewed. The approach is applied to explain changes in Australian politics over recent decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political interest is a crucial precursor to political engagement, but little is known about how to stimulate greater interest. The article explores the role social motives have in generating interest. A laboratory experiment is used in which it is possible to manipulate beliefs about the social rewards of political engagement as well as external efficacy beliefs. Across two types of measures for political interest (self-reports and revealed preferences), connecting political engagement with social rewards led to substantial increases in political interest. Moreover, these effects were particularly strong among individuals with low levels of external efficacy. Ultimately, the data provide clear evidence that political interest can be positively stimulated with social rewards mobilisation techniques and that it is rooted in beliefs about the potential motives pursuable through politics. The paper concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of these results for studies of political participation and mobilisation efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper interprets C. Wright Mills's distinction between ‘private troubles’ and ‘public issues’ as indicating both a conceptual and an institutional separation between civil society and the public sphere. It goes on to argue that Habermas's social theory is founded upon the view that ‘distorted communication’ should be analysed within an already institutionalized public space within civil society. Arguments that claim that the public sphere is degenerate on historical or theoretical grounds are rejected. The paper differentiates between pre-institutional and institutional levels of the public sphere and concludes by illustrating this conceptual distinction, first, through a brief discussion of 'new social movements' and Alain Touraine's actionist sociology, and secondly, through a discussion of natural justice and public inquiries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to clarify the continuing debate about the theoretical characteristics of vote trading. It sets about this by first emphasizing existing distinctions among types of vote trading systems, most importantly, the distinction between trades on entire platforms characterizing social states (implicit vote trading) and trades on the individual issues making up the platforms (explicit vote trading). The subdivisions of the latter type are more carefully explored, with the key results being that: while all vote trading systems may lead to circularity in the attempt to choose; and white implicit vote trading inevitably involves such circularity; vote trading over individual, independent issues may be stable. The challenge to the social choice field is therefore to be more careful in specifying the conditions of foresight, renegotiability and the like, and to compare theoretical systems for explicit vote trading with actual legislative rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elites forming a perception of what the public wants is an important way in which democratic representation comes about, the assumption holds. Yet very few are the studies that examine the effect of elite perceptions on politician action. This study sets out to revisit the matter, measuring actual public priorities, elite perceptions of public priorities and a wide range of representative actions with regard to a few hundred concrete issues. We find that elite perceptions matter for their representative behavior; elites are much more likely to take action on issues they believe citizens care about. The effect exists across the board; perceptions matter in three different political systems, for different types of political action, and for electorally safe and unsafe, trustee and delegate politicians alike. These results speak to the micro-level factors connecting public and policy agendas, and the conditions under which representatives are attentive to public issue priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that social media companies' power to regulate communication in the public sphere illustrates a novel type of domination. The idea is that, since social media companies can partially dictate the terms of citizens' political participation in the public sphere, they can arbitrarily interfere with the choices individuals make qua citizens. I contend that social media companies dominate citizens in two different ways. First, I focus on the cases in which social media companies exercise direct control over political speech. They exercise quasi-public power over citizens because their regulation of speech on social media platforms implies the capacity to arbitrarily interfere with citizens' democratic contestation in the political system. Second, companies' algorithmic governance entails the capacity to interfere with citizens' choices about what mode of discursive engagement they endorse in their relationships with fellow citizens. By raising the cost of deliberative engagement, companies narrow citizens' choice menu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has provided contested hypotheses about the impact of income inequality on electoral participation. This study reexamines the debate between conflict and relative power theories by focusing on a largely ignored factor: social mobility. We argue that social mobility conditions the inequality-participation nexus by alleviating the frustration, class conflict, and efficacy gaps between the rich and the poor that the prevailing theories assume income inequality to create. By utilizing the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, we test this argument focusing on US counties. Our analysis confirms that the effects of income inequality on citizens' likelihood of voting vary depending on mobility, suggesting that social mobility provides a crucial context in which income inequality can play out in substantially different ways. This article implies that more scholarly endeavors should be made to clarify the multifaceted structure of inequality for improving our understanding of the relationship between economic and political inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented that discusses issue articles on topics including political participation, the connection between educational attainment and political representation, and political leadership selection.

Leading researchers are questioning the continued use of competitive model testing to explain participation within British political parties. This paper argues that difficulties with this approach have not arisen out of the use of model testing per se, but because of the shortcomings of the models currently in use. A multidisciplinary approach towards accounting for participation exposes some of the theoretical and analytical shortcomings in previous research into political party members, and identifies relevant factors underlying participation that merit investigation in greater detail. In particular, analytical frameworks derived from the disciplines of marketing, nonprofit management and organisational behaviour provide appropriate and robust instruments for measuring factors underlying participation that are generally ignored in the political science literature. Alternative models comprising appropriately theorized variables drawn from a number of disciplines are presented, and the implications of a multidisciplinary approach towards explaining party activism are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a signaling model of corporate lobbying in democratic capitalist societies to analyze the conditions that lead to a powerful political position of business. Proceeding from the traditional dichotomy of structural economic determinantsversusbusiness’ political action, our model predicts the conditions under which elected political decisionmakers modify their policy pledges to accommodate business’ political preferences, or override business’ lobbying messages and honor their pledges. Our results show that the structural power of business over public policy is contingent on two variables: the size of reputation costs of business in relation to its material costs of lobbying; and the ratio of the policymaker's reputation constraints from policy commitments and campaign pledges to the electoral costs arising from adverse effects of policy. We evaluate our model using case studies of business lobbying on environmental and financial services regulation in Britain and Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to describe the conditions necessary for the furthering of democracy in Turkey by focusing on a certain conception of democratic legitimacy that goes beyond formal arrangements. It argues that the effective participation of citizens in democratic procedures is necessary for the consolidation of democracy in public life. To defend this argument, the theoretical background developed in deliberative models of democracy is followed. The quality of‘talk’, as a constitutive feature of democracy, is explored by following the critical perspectives in deliberative theory that focus on the discursive mechanisms of exclusion and on power relations intrinsic to deliberative procedures. For this purpose, the deliberative processes in a series of‘working group meetings’, carried out as a part of the Local Agenda 21 project, are analysed. The democratic capacity of deliberative experiences and public dialogue is analysed by examining the inclusion/exclusion of opposing ideas, different identities and discourse styles during these working groups meetings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In political theory, descriptive representation as a corrective to structural asymmetries within society is usually debated against the background of formal political institutions. It is discussed in this paper as a means to enhance the declining legitimacy of Dutch works councils as important sites of democratic decision-making in their own right. The aim is to show that the moral requirements of democratic inclusion have to be weighed against the functional requirements of effective representation, concluding that in some cases the costs in terms of effectiveness exceed the gains in terms of inclusiveness. Hence, the debate about descriptive representation is clearly in need of a more contextualized assessment of its pros and cons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminists have taken issue with liberal democracy on a number of counts, including the conditions necessary to achieve political equality and the importance to be attached to political participation. This paper considers issues currently raised under the rubric of citizenship, earlier and continuing arguments for a more actively participatory democracy, and questions associated with representing social heterogeneity and group difference. The argument throughout is that while liberal democracy has signally failed to deliver on its promises to women, it does not help to address these failings in terms of giving up on liberal democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature and level of rewards to politicians is an important issue in public management. It receives little theoretical attention in academic political science today, although it offers the basis of a Popperian ‘crucial experiment’ for testing the explanatory claims of the rent-seeking rational choice model of politics. This paper discusses the extent to which the core rent-seeking model can explain observed patterns of political rewards. It considers the core model against two modified models (each with two variants), using data from Australia and the UK and a limited number of observations drawn from other countries. The core-rent-seeking rational choice model appears to have poor explanatory power. A familiar overdetermination problem arises in testing the explanatory claims of modified models. Some disaggregation may be needed to refine the approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years the theory of consumption cleavages has progressed far towards supplanting traditional explanations of voting behaviour resting on socialization and issue-based electoral choice. What is not often realized is that the new theory cannot readily coexist with traditional explanations. If consumption cleavage theory is right then much of what we thought we understood about political behaviour is wrong; and the implications of this confrontation extend far beyond voting studies or even political science, to fields as diverse as anthropology and social psychology. In this paper it is argued that traditional explanations of voting choice have not been proved defective by the consumption cleavage theorists, nor has the proposed replacement been proved superior in this field of study. The consumption cleavage approach is questioned because its adoption would involve great sacrifices while offering little in return. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is divided into two parts. Part I contains a critique of two existing power indexes—the Shapley-Shubik index and the Banzhaf index. Part II begins with a rigorous analysis of the relationship between luck, decisiveness and success. It is shown then that the supposed ‘paradoxes of power’ generated by the other indexes can be easily dissolved. An extended application of the method of analysis of the US Constitutional Convention of 1787 follows. Finally, the relation between decisiveness (a probability) and power (a capability) is presented, and the question posed in the title is answered. At two points, the relative of the conceptual points made to the pluralist-elitist debate is made explicit, and support is offered for the view that each side's conclusions follow from its assumptions about the nature of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary purpose of this paper is to cast doubt on the theoretical and empirical soundness of two well-known survey studies of public opinion, ‘Consensus and Ideology in American Politics’ by McClosky, and ‘Fundamental Principles of Democracy, Bases of Agreement and Disagreement’ by Prothro and Grigg. That these articles contributed to the pluralist orthodoxy of the fifties and early sixties is evident from their data and conclusions, which can be summarized as follows: (1) it cannot be claimed that the United States enjoys a wide democratic consensus; the majority of citizens exhibit only a superficial commitment to democratic norms and ideas; (2) rather, it is the social and political elites who are the main repositories of democratic virtue; therefore (3) any attempt greatly to increase popular participation would needlessly expose present institutions to authoritarian pressures. Although the past decade or so has witnessed a rehabilitation of radical democratic theory, these articles have enjoyed remarkable freedom from serious criticism. Indeed, their findings have become conventional academic wisdom. Through a detailed analysis, I attempt to demonstrate that the questionnaires used in the two investigations are both carelessly constructed and arbitrarily tied to a narrow, ahistorical conception of democracy. It is also argued that both studies are marred by a fundamental contradiction common (though hitherto undetected) in pluralist writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diachronic investigation of partisan choice and issue orientation by generational analysis is a popular method of contemporary political research. There is as well increased interest in the role played by women in politics. Yet studies of European politics have rarely explored the utility of analysis which assumes shared generational political perspectives in explaining differences in the political behaviour and orientations of men and women. This paper evaluates generational analysis as an explanation of differences in the issue orientations of British men and women during the 1970 electoral campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A widely accepted finding in the literature on political participation is that individuals living in poorer neighbourhoods are less likely to vote than those living in more affluent neighbourhoods. Yet, why some poor residents of the most deprived neighbourhoods are more likely to vote than others is still understudied. This article presents a new theoretical framework arguing that when they believe that most others vote in the neighbourhood, poor citizens are more likely to follow their example than wealthy citizens. To empirically test these claims, I develop a two-level multilevel model using survey data and the Index of Multiple Deprivation for England. My findings point to the higher importance of a social norm of voting for the political behaviour of poor individuals than wealthy individuals. Social norms define which behaviour is right and proper. They are enforced through social interactions with others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can country leaders improve citizens' ethnic outgroup views by changing ethnic representation in government? Years of pressure from the international community calling for leaders to make particularly their cabinets more ethnically representative seems to suggest that ethnic representation—conceptualized as descriptive and substantive representation and ministerial cooperation—is key to improving citizens' outgroup views. I argue that increasing ethnic representation influences majority and minority citizens differently; minority citizens' outgroup views will become more favorable, while majority citizens' views will worsen. Using a pre-registered vignette experiment with ethnic Albanians and Macedonians in North Macedonia, I show that ethnic representation does not provide the improvements in outgroup relations that many have hoped. Both groups' affect toward and perceptions of the cabinet change somewhat, but increasing ethnic representation does not improve overall outgroup attitudes. These results suggest that ethnic representation alone does not lead to more productive interethnic relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many studies address the representation of women in parliament, few explore gender representation in Africa. Prior research on women's representation conducted in various areas of the world has emphasized the type of electoral system, quotas and the economic affluence of a country, as well as the state's political culture. In this evaluation these commonly used indicators are complemented by two factors that are not that frequently employed - a country's degree of democracy and its level of corruption. Besides quota provisions and the electoral system type of a country, both of these additional variables affect women's representation. Higher containment of corruption fosters higher percentages of women in parliament. In contrast, democratic states have fewer female members in parliament than non-democratic states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars increasingly argue that the vegan lifestyle reflects a broader pattern of how political behavior is becoming more individualized and private. Veganism is particularly viewed as an unconventional form of political participation, as it is conducted to address ethical concerns and to change market practices. However, this argumentation lacks detailed empirical data. By means of an original standardized survey of a purposive sample of 648 vegans in Switzerland, this study shows that (1) a vast majority of vegans is politically motivated and aims to induce change in society at large; (2) they are highly engaged in a broad variety of political activities; and (3) politically motivated vegans live vegan more strictly and are more politically active than vegans motivated by personal concerns. This study contributes to the understanding of political participation in current times, and the insights gained may prove useful to vegan movement groups or the food industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suggests that differences in political awareness result in considerable heterogeneity among the electorate. Concerns raised about ability of voters to make sensible contributions to debates about public policy; Political scientists' increased awareness of measurement error; Developments in the study of public opinion.

While some consider populist parties to be a threat to liberal democracy, others have argued that populist parties may positively affect the quality of democracy by increasing political participation of citizens. This supposition, however, has hitherto not been subjected to rigorous empirical tests. The voter turnout literature, moreover, has primarily focused on stable institutional and party system characteristics – ignoring more dynamic determinants of voter turnout related to party competition. To fill this double gap in the literature, we examine the effect of populist parties, both left and right, on aggregate-level turnout in Western and Eastern European parliamentary elections. Based on a dataset on 315 elections in 31 European democracies since 1970s, we find that turnout is higher when populist parties are represented in parliament prior to an election in Eastern Europe, but not in Western Europe. These findings further our understanding of the relationship between populism, political participation and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article cites a study that analyzes the policy statement of the three main Irish parties, which are the Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and Labour, to establish whether it can be distinguished in terms and right. The data used for the analysis are the election programs issued by the parties at the general elections between 1948 and November 1982. The analysis is focused on the economic policy of the programs, to derive a left-right dimensions on more versus less state intervention in the economy.

Discusses the argument for greater female participation in politics. Assemblies with a small proportion of women inadequately reflect the composition of society; Special interest represented by women which requires representation; Women's limited means for self-development.

This article employs the October 1974 British Election Study to examine the level and nature of political ideology among British political activists, the effects of socioeconomic characteristics on these attitudes, and the impact of the attitudes on political behaviour. On balance, the activist group closely resembles the non activist population. Activists are somewhat more ideological in their thinking than non- activists, but the differences are quite small. Demographic attributes affect the policy attitudes of the elite slightly more than the non activists, but again differences are small. The influence of issue attitudes on voting is about the same for activists and non activists. These results stand in contrast to studies showing large élite-mass policy differences in the United States and other work documenting ideological orientations in higher levels of the Labour Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes the recurrence of crises in the study of politics in the 20th century. Explanation on the nature and functions of search behavior; Example of a search behavior; Application of the search behavior on present circumstances of political studies.

Independent offices for future generations are rare among institutional designs that aim to ameliorate short-termism in democracies. Drawing on the experience of offices for future generations in Israel, Hungary, and Wales, the article argues that such institutions face at least three challenges to their legitimacy: first, the capacity of an unelected agency to constrain government and law-making; second, the ability of a single office to adequately represent the plurality of interests within and across future generations; and third, their political fragility and vulnerability. The article develops the counterintuitive argument that offices for future generations can enhance their democratic legitimacy through embedding systematic public participation in their activities, in particular through the institutionalization of deliberative mini-publics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The call for more direct democracy, and referenda in particular, is often heard and met with support from large numbers of citizens in many countries. This article explores the motives for supporting referenda: Do citizens support them for intrinsic reasons, because referenda allow them to exercise their democratic rights more directly? Or are preferences for referenda predominantly based on the expectation that they will produce desired policy outcomes and thus instrumentally motivated? Our survey experiment explores such instrumental preferences by assessing how substantial policy preferences affect individuals' choice of referenda over alternative decision-making procedures. We show that congruence between a respondent's own opinion and the expected majority opinion is associated with support for a referendum on a given matter, and thus arrive at the conclusion that calls for referenda should be reassessed in light of the partly instrumental character of procedural preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question, 'which kind of democratic governance people prefer', has moved to the forefront in current democracy research. This article uses existing hypotheses on democratic preferences as an input and employs an advanced research design to find out what citizens want if they had engaged in deliberation and reflection. We conducted an online-experiment with a deliberative treatment asking 256 German citizens in 2016. Our findings show that deliberation does not lead to more informed or differential preferences for governance models compared with getting informed or 'thinking twice'. One reason are high levels of consistency between basic democratic values and governance choices already before the experiment, contradicting our initial assumption that preferences about democracy are generally ill-formed. Overall, our experiment shows that post-deliberative democratic preferences are mainly driven by issue salience and disenchantment with the actual shape of representative democracy. We detect a sort of a 'populist' impulse where disenchantment conduces to calls for a stronger voice of the 'people' and participatory governance models, irrespective of their concrete design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to democratic theory, policy responsiveness is a key characteristic of democratic government: citizens' preferences should affect policy outcomes. Empirically, however, the connection between public opinion and policy is not self-evident and is increasingly challenged. Using an originally constructed data set with information from 21 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries between 1980 and 2014, our research design allows for a comprehensive investigation of the linkages between ideological positions of citizens, parliaments and cabinets on one hand, and redistributive policies in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries on the other hand. We find that the role of the cabinet is more important than that of parliament. Although citizens' left–right positions do not have an effect (directly or indirectly) on the level of social expenditure, there is a connection between mass preferences and the ideological position of parliament and government in high-turnout contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Rawls is a central figure in contemporary philosophical and theoretical discussions of civil disobedience, which hope to contribute to significant political debates around when and in which forms political dissent, protest and resistance are appropriate. Ignoring the frame in which Rawls discusses civil disobedience has led critics to wrongly attack his theory for being too restrictive when it is more likely to be too permissive. That permissiveness depends on treating any political order which does not come close to fulfilling his theory of justice as absolutely illegitimate. In this sense, Rawls' theory of political authority is binary and demanding. The problems his theory shares with most others, including his critics', show that political authority needs to be disaggregated to make sense of the conditions under which different forms of protest and resistance are appropriate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom holds that asset owners favor parties on the center-right. This assumption, however, ignores the possibility that party positions may shift over time and across contexts. The electoral payoff from ownership thus depends on how the policies of the major parties treat those assets. In this article, we argue that the prediction that asset holders support right-of-center parties rests on the position-taking strategies of parties. We test this expectation with evidence from six elections in Australia and with a dataset of post-election surveys in 25 advanced democracies. Utilizing different measures for key concepts, both analyses support our claims. Study findings identify the supply side of electoral competition as an important condition for patrimonial economic voting and, more generally, confirm the role of parties in mobilizing voters around issues on which they have a competitive advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article announces that the article entitled "The Calculus of Ethnic Minority Voting in Britain" by David Sanders, Anthony Heath, Stephen Fisher, and Maria Sobolewska, published within this issue, is the editors' choice for its coverage of minority voting in Great Britain's 2010 election.

The article discusses a study on the effect of party organization and election expenses in the British 1970 General Election. The study used a variety of statistical methods including Spearman rank correlation, parametric analysis, correlation coefficients and scatterplots. It concluded that there was little theoretical or empirical grounds for justifying a causal relationship between election expenditure and votes.

This article argues that the theory of legitimation crisis developed by Offe and Habermas offers an instructive theoretical framework for explaining the current surge of populism across the West. The article argues that this populist resurgence is indicative of a profound legitimation crisis of the Western welfare state, which ultimately derives from its inability to control a globalized economic system. The article argues that two prominent rival accounts of the populist resurgence both suffer from their inattention to the specific ideational content of populism, as a reaction to a form of elite political rule experienced as illegitimate. By contrast, the advantage of the theory of legitimation crisis is that it is able to directly account for the structural conditions of the present legitimation crisis. Finally, the article offers an integrative account of why populism tends to focus on immigration in Northern Europe and on economic issues in Southern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last decades have witnessed a spread of democratic innovations. Chief among them are deliberative mini-publics that gather randomly selected citizens to discuss salient public issues with the aim of generating some kind of 'uptake' in the broader political system. Political theorists have addressed the pros and cons of such innovations. Nevertheless, little is known about the citizens' perspective on such mini-publics and on their role in the political system. Drawing on qualitative in-depth interviews, this article scrutinizes participants' expectations. Findings show that they are motivated by internal expectations (desire of sociability, learning, and civic duty) and external expectations (presence and voice). Participants fundamentally perceive mini publics as a way to enrich the linkage between voters and their representatives, without forsaking the logic of electoral delegation. This work suggests that citizens may have complex and evolving conceptions of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By employing individual-level data on MPs in 15 countries and 73 national and local assemblies, this article examines the conditions under which individual MPs are responsive to interest organizations. We show that MPs' political values influence their responsiveness: MPs with more egalitarian and socially open values are more responsive to interest organizations. Moreover, MPs' conceptions of democracy also matter in that more negative views of popular political involvement in democratic decision making are linked to lower responsiveness to interest organizations. Reliance on established ties with groups in society as well as support for technocracy have differential effects for responsiveness toward "old" and "new" interest organizations characterized by diverse social bases. These findings have important implications for democratic practice since they show how MPs are not all equally responsive to organized citizens as well as how different types of factors matter for responsiveness to "old" and "new" types of interest organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, practical and scholarly work on participatory and deliberative governance has focused on supply-side issues such as how to engage citizens in public policy. Yet little is known about the demand for public engagement, particularly from those authorised to make collective decisions. This article empirically examines how political leaders view and value public input. It draws on 51 in-depth interviews with senior national ministers from the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. The interviews reveal that leaders value public input because it informs their decisions, connects them to everyday people and 'tests' advice from other sources. Their support for participatory governing is, however, qualified; they find formal consultation processes too staged and antagonistic to produce constructive interactions. Instead leaders prefer informal, spontaneous conversations with individual citizens. This hidden world of informal elite–citizen interaction has implications for the design and democratic aspirations of public engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Epistemic questions have become an important area of debate within democratic theory. Epistemic democrats have revived epistemic justification of democracy, while social scientific research has speared a significant debate on voter knowledge. An area which has received less attention, however, is the epistemic case for markets. Market advocates have developed a number of epistemic critiques of democracy which suggest that most goods are better provided by markets than democratic institutions. Despite representing important challenges to democracy, these critiques have gone without reply as democratic theorists have tended to exclude markets from consideration. This article responds to these critiques and argues that there are good epistemic grounds for granting a much greater role to democracy than its market critics have claimed. It argues that there is a broad range of goods, including important ethical goods, which are better provided by democracy than markets due to the particular epistemic burdens they create. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizens who abstain from voting in consecutive elections and inequality in turnout in democratic elections constitute a challenge to the legitimacy of democracy. Applying the law of dispersion, which stipulates higher levels of turnout and higher levels of equality in turnout are positively related, we study turnout patterns across different types of elections in Denmark, a high-turnout European context. Across three different elections with turnout rates from 56.3% to 85.9%, we use a rich, nationwide panel dataset of 2.1 million citizens with validated turnout and high-quality sociodemographic variables. A total of 9% of the citizens are abstainers in the three consecutive elections, and these are disproportionately male, of non-Western ethnic background, with little education, and with low income. The law of dispersion finds support as inequalities in turnout increase when turnout decreases and vice versa. Furthermore, municipalities with lower turnout have higher inequalities in participation than high-turnout municipalities in local elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments have turned to public deliberation as a way to engage citizens in governance with the goal of rebuilding faith in government institutions and authority as well as to provide quality inputs into governance. This article offers a systematic analysis of the literature on the effects of deliberative events on participants' political efficacy and trust. The systematic review contextualizes the results from a 6-day deliberative event. This case study is distinctive in highlighting the long-term impacts on participants' political trust and efficacy as key outcomes of the deliberative process unfold, that is, City Council receives then responds to the participants' recommendations report. Using four-wave panel data spanning 2.5 years and three public opinion polls (control groups), the study demonstrates that participants in deliberative events are more efficacious and trusting prior to and after the deliberative event. Despite the case study's evidence and the systematic review of existing literature, questions remain about whether enhanced opportunities for citizen engagement in governance can ameliorate low levels of political trust and efficacy observed in Western democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legislating a minimum age of marriage at 18 has stirred counter-mobilization in some, but not all, countries where religious or traditional institutions enjoy constitutional authority. To explore differences between states regarding likelihood of counter-mobilization, we investigate two cases in Africa. In Sudan, a government-led child marriage reform initiative has sparked counter-mobilization by conservative religious actors, while a similar initiative in Zambia has not caused visible counter-mobilization among traditional groups and has gained the support of many chiefs. With the literature on doctrinal gender status issues as theoretical background, we argue that the nature of law—codified versus living—is a factor in these distinct trajectories. We further identify variations in two mechanisms, legal power structure (centralized vs decentralized) and type of political battle (interpretation vs administration), that link nature of law to variation in the likelihood of counter-mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to a recent methodological critique, much of contemporary political theory has lost touch with the realities of political life. The aim of this article is to problematise the underlying antagonism between distant ideals and concrete contexts of agency. Drawing on Kant's notion of pragmatic Belief - the idea that in certain situations we can put full confidence in something we lack sufficient evidence for - I point to the distinctly practical function of political ideals that these disputes pay scant attention to. Particularly in political contexts, action is itself often framed by 'ideal constructions' that not only motivate and enable us to pursue uncertain goals but also ultimately feed back onto what is practically possible. The upshot is that especially if we are interested in a kind of theorising that is less detached from political practice, we should be wary of disregarding distant ideals as unduly utopian from the outset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the heart of the ideal of deliberative democracy lies an emphasis on the political autonomy of citizens participating in procedures of public justification aimed at the promotion of the common good. The recent systemic turn in deliberative democracy has moved so far away from this ideal that it relegates the deliberations of citizens to a secondary matter, legitimising forms of rule that may even undermine the normative impulses central to the project of deliberative democracy. We critically discuss this theoretical development and show how deliberative agency can effectively be exercised in complex political systems. We argue, in particular, that political parties play a central role in facilitating the exercise of deliberative agency, fostering deliberation among citizens and linking their deliberations to decisions. Instead of giving up on the possibility that citizens participate in procedures of public justification, deliberative democrats should look to parties' unique ability to enable deliberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article asks why institutional reforms work in one place and not another and why old ways of doing things can prove so resilient. It argues in favour of a concept of institutional formation, which is different from 'institutional design' as a time-limited event or 'institutional change' as an open-ended historical trajectory. Institutional formation is conceptualised as an animated, nested and embedded process. A multi-level framework is developed that specifies the links between institutional actors, institutional rules and institutional contexts. The model is elaborated with reference to a case study of local government reform in England, specifically the devolution of responsibilities from central government to voluntary collaborations of elected local authorities ('combined authorities'). The model is used to explain variation in the process of institutional formation in two different city-regions, focusing on the role of leaders, legacies and localities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]