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This research note investigates how different sources of economic information affected citizens’ approval of the government in Portugal from 2001 to 2018. It compares the predictive power of the revised and most accurate data on GDP growth with other economic indicators that were available to the public at the time, such as the first estimates of recent growth and the forecasts of future growth. It finds that approval is best predicted by information about forecasted growth for the current year. These results provide further indirect evidence that the state of the economy, as it plays out directly in people’s lives and experiences, may be less consequential for evaluations of the government than the mediated information about it that is conveyed to the public.

Can governments succeed in making courts politically compliant without undermining the public’s overall confidence in the judicial system? Many studies show a positive relationship between judicial independence and citizens’ trust in courts, suggesting the answer should be negative. However, most of those studies have focused on contemporary correlations between institutions and attitudes, without assessing what happens when court curbing is actually implemented. Additionally, they also indicate that factors such as citizens’ education level and political preferences may moderate the consequences of attacks on judicial independence. We use Europe as a laboratory to analyze the repercussions on public opinion of the assaults on judicial independence conducted by populist governments in Turkey, Hungary, and Poland over the past decade. Employing data from the Eurobarometer and a difference-in-differences approach, we find evidence of an adverse effect of court curbing on judicial trust. However, such effect emerges as stronger and more consistent among those citizens who are most ideologically distant from their governments. These findings coincide with experimental evidence indicating the apathy of large segments of public opinion towards the prospects of democratic backsliding, suggesting that many citizens may fail to change their trust in the courts even when governments make them politically subservient.

Supplemental Material for Beyond the Myth of Legality? Framing Effects and Public Reactions to High Court Decisions in Europe by Pedro C. Magalhães, Jon K. Skiple, Miguel M. Pereira, Sveinung Arnesen, and Henrik L. Bentsen in Comparative Political Studies

In this study, we investigate how socioeconomic status is related to people's commitment to liberal democracy. Based on sociological and psychological theories of social conflict and dominance, we argue that those who enjoy a more privileged position in the social hierarchy tend to develop stronger preferences for the existing social and political order. Conversely, people in underprivileged positions tend to be less supportive of that order. Hence, we expect the relationship between socioeconomic status and commitment to liberal democracy to be context-specific: positive in liberal democracies but negative in autocracies. Furthermore, we argue that income inequality amplifies these dynamics, widening the gap between low and high status individuals. We test our hypotheses using the fifth wave of the World Value Surveys.

Two findings stand out in the literature on public attitudes vis- a-vis courts. The first is that judicial independence increases public trust. The second is that ‘to know courts is to love them’. In this study, these stylised facts are used as a starting point to ask three questions. First, is there also a role for judicial accountability in fostering public trust, above and beyond that played by independence? Second, could it be that only the most aware citizens are sensitive to such properties of the judicial system? Third, is the notion that ‘to know courts is to love them’ limited to systems with high levels of judicial independence and accountability? Using recently available macro-level indicators of judicial independence and accountability and the high-quality survey data collected by the European Social Survey in 32 countries throughout more than a decade, this study provides evidence that the answers to these questions are positive.

Survey experiment testing the effect of the salience of radical right discourse regarding social benefits and subsidies on the level of agreement with a discriminatory item in a double list experiment

Supplemental Material, sj-docx-1-ppq-10.1177_1354068818797367 for New forms of mobilization, new people mobilized? Evidence from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems by Pedro C Magalhães, John H Aldrich and Rachel K Gibson in Party Politics

Supplemental Material, pp-2018-0008-File012 for New forms of mobilization, new people mobilized? Evidence from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems by Pedro C Magalhães, John H Aldrich, and Rachel K Gibson in Party Politics