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How do foreign political events shape voters' evaluation of policies whose outcomes are hard to observe? We argue that policy-specific political processes abroad provide information about the policy's feasibility and desirability that allows voters to update their preferences. We analyze how key events in British Brexit politics affected attitudes towards the European Union in other European countries. The results of 'unexpected events during survey' designs, a natural experiment, and a panel analysis show that events highlighting the difficulties of the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union led to a higher support of European integration in remaining member states, whereas an event highlighting the opportunities of Brexit resulted in more Eurosceptic attitudes. The article demonstrates that foreign events can influence voters' policy attitudes in other countries, highlighting the systemic consequences of events like Brexit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political communication researchers studying the news media coverage often distinguish between broadsheets and tabloids when sampling relevant news outlets. But recent work has pointed towards a 'tabloidization' of news coverage, complicating the empirical distinction between the two. Computational methods for text analysis can help us better understand how distinct the news coverage between these two types of news outlets is. We take the Brexit referendum as a case study illustrating various aspects in which broadsheets and tabloids cover an issue permeated by othering and divisive rhetoric. We focus on Brexit-related news coverage before and after the referendum (N = 32,946) and use word embeddings to analyze the portrayal of different groups of citizens that can generate an in- and outgroup divide. First, we document the presence of media-based othering in the form of overly similar migrant and European Union citizen representations that are, in turn, very dissimilar to the UK citizen representation. Second, we show partial convergence between tabloid and broadsheet newspapers, as differences in the degree and characteristics of media coverage are rather small and specific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In developing countries, trade is increasingly associated with greater returns to high-skilled labor and rising inequality. These empirical patterns are at odds with canonical models of trade in the developing world. What does this mean for the political economy of trade in these countries? We argue that although developing countries have a comparative advantage in low-skill products, these are produced by workers that are relatively high-skilled compared to their peers. Trade and global production benefit relatively skilled workers, particularly those exposed to exports and inward foreign direct investment in manufacturing. Our argument offers insight into why relatively skilled workers are most supportive of free trade and why inequality is rising in developing countries. We examine micro- and macro-level implications of our argument using cross-national survey data on policy preferences and aggregate data on trade and inequality. The findings have important implications for the political economy of trade and global production in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into parliamentary speech making–behaviour of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) usually takes a static perspective. We offer an interactive and dynamic approach that understands parliamentary debates as a relational network phenomenon and investigates MEPs' debate interactions. This allows us to uncover dynamics of inclusiveness and pluralism, self-reinforcing power relationships and transnational policy alliances. Analyzing 11,408 debate interactions between MEPs using a combination of text and dynamic network analysis, we find that male, senior and influential parliamentarians from powerful member states receive more attention with evidence for a self-reinforcing effect over time. Interestingly, seniority matters more for debate attention than leadership positions. Sharing the same nationality and a similar political leaning also shape debate coalitions with the former being more important than the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the systemic implications of the growing popular backlash against international cooperation and analyzes how voter-endorsed attempts to withdraw from international institutions reverberate abroad. Observing other countries' disintegration experiences allows voters to better assess the feasibility and desirability of such withdrawals. More positive withdrawal experiences encourage exit-support abroad, whereas negative experiences are likely to have a deterring effect. These contagion effects will be conditioned by the availability of information and voters' willingness to learn. The article empirically examines this argument for the case of Brexit. It leverages original survey data from 58,959 EU-27 Europeans collected in six survey waves during the Brexit withdrawal negotiations and from a two-wave survey of 2,241 Swiss voters conducted around the first Brexit extension in spring 2019. It finds both encouragement and deterrence effects, which are bigger when respondents pay attention to Brexit and are dampened by motivated reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite years of crisis, the euro has enjoyed strong popular support across the Eurozone periphery. In light of the high costs of internal devaluation strategies, this begs the question why the public has remained in favor of the common currency. In this article, we propose a theoretical mechanism that accounts for both voters' pocketbook preferences and their sociotropic assessments over the noisy trade-offs associated with the outcomes of euro membership and euro exit. Using original survey data from three consecutive survey waves in Greece (conducted in July, September, and December 2015, respectively), we analyze the attitudes of Greek voters toward the euro in an environment of acute uncertainty, austerity, high unemployment, and economic recession. First, we juxtapose our uncertainty mechanism of popular euro attitudes against other explanations put forward in the literature and find strong support for our argument. Second, we conduct a survey experiment to tap into attitudes toward the euro-austerity trade-off and find that as uncertainty over policy outcomes diminishes, framing effects abate in significance, especially among those who voted No in the July 2015 referendum. Finally, we derive distinct sets of euro preferences for different 'vulnerability profiles'. Over time, as the trade-offs of euro membership become more pronounced, we find a marked fall in euro support between July and December 2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A surprising development in the post-referendum Brexit process has been that vote intentions have remained largely stable, despite the cumbersome withdrawal negotiations. We examine this puzzle by analyzing the role of voters' expectations about the European Union's willingness to accommodate the UK after the pro-Brexit vote. Using data from the British Election Study, we explore how these expectations are updated over time, and how they are related to vote intentions. We find that voters who were more optimistic about the European Union's response were more likely to vote Leave. Over the course of the negotiations, Leavers have become more disillusioned. These adjustments, however, have not translated into shifts in vote intentions. Overall, we find evidence that motivated reasoning is an important driver of public opinion on Brexit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Kingdom is the first country to withdraw its membership from the European Union (EU). Immigration featured high on the Brexit news agenda and EU citizens' rights to work and live in the United Kingdom are likely to be affected by the country's exit from the EU. This study analyzes how salient EU citizens were in Brexit news, and investigates whether there was a relationship between the negative portrayal of EU citizens and the type of news outlet. The analysis is based on 19,367 news stories published between June 1, 2015, and June 23, 2016. Automated content analysis was used to determine whether EU citizens were mentioned. The results do not reveal a divide between tabloids and broadsheets, but between national and regional papers. It is only in regional papers from England and Wales that EU citizens were more likely to be mentioned if the tone of a news story was more negative. The findings also suggest that the news media presented the Brexit referendum as a vote about migration in general rather than about intra-EU migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzing international negotiations among the member states of the European Union raises a number of analytical issues, especially in unusual circumstances such as the Eurozone crisis. Our article discusses these issues in the light of existing theory and informed by the empirical analyses assembled in this special issue. 'National preferences' or ideal points of the governments involved are driven by their domestic socio-economic and political conditions and institutions, the dimensionality of the negotiations, and strategic considerations. We then discuss how national preferences, states' bargaining power, the strategic and institutional bargaining context, and the bargaining dynamics jointly influence the bargaining outcome. Examples from European negotiations in the context of the Eurozone crisis illustrate both the complexity of the process and the value of serious, theoretically informed, empirical analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does offshoring affect individual party preferences in multiparty systems? We argue that exposure to offshoring influences individual preferences for those political parties with clear policy positions on issues relevant for individuals with offshorable jobs (left, liberal, and center-right parties) but does not affect voting decisions for parties concentrating on other issues (green or populist right parties). Examining individual-level data from five waves of the European Social Survey for 18 advanced democracies, we find that these effects vary by skill level and exposure. Offshoring increases preferences for liberal and center-right parties that advocate economic openness among the highly skilled. In contrast, low-skilled individuals exposed to offshoring are more likely to prefer leftist political parties that champion social protection and redistribution. Offshoring does not affect the propensity to vote for green and populist right parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When countries face balance-of-payments crises, their policy responses vary widely. This article argues that the choice between the two main options of internal adjustment (i.e., austerity and structural reforms) and external adjustment (i.e., exchange-rate devaluation) depends on how costly each of these strategies is for a country overall. Although the choice of adjustment strategy is thus structurally determined, the level of political conflict associated with crisis management depends on both the national vulnerability profile and partisan interests. Moreover, irrespective of the adjustment strategy, all governments design the specific reforms in ways that shelter their own voters. Empirically, this article uses qualitative case studies and survey data to examine the significant variation in crisis responses, crisis politics, and distributive outcomes of the 2008-2010 global financial crisis in eight Eastern European countries. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the Eastern European experience for crisis politics in the Eurozone crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the special issue on the political economy of the Euro crisis, which aims to improve our understanding of the causes, consequences, and implications of the highly unusual nature of this crisis: a financial crisis among developed countries within a supranational monetary union. The article provides a brief chronology of the crisis, discusses its underlying causes, and reviews the ways in which comparative and international political economy can help us understand the crisis. The article then discusses the individual and collective contributions of the articles in the special issue and discusses possible future research paths on the political economy of the Euro crisis. We conclude with a brief discussion of how a political economy perspective informs our understanding of the long-term prospects for the Eurozone and European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Political Communication in European Parliamentary Elections," by Michaela Maier, edited by Jesper Strömbäck and Lynda Lee Kaid.