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For the very first time in EU history, the 2014 EP elections provided citizens with the opportunity to influence the nomination of the Commission President by casting a vote for the main Europarties’ ‘lead candidates’. By subjecting the position of the Commission President to an open political contest, many experts have formulated the expectation that heightened political competition would strengthen the weak electoral connection between EU citizens and EU legislators, which some consider a root cause for the EU’s lack of public support. In particular, this contest was on display in the so-called ‘Eurovision Debate’, a televised debate between the main contenders for the Commission President broadcasted live across Europe. Drawing on a quasi-experimental study conducted in 24 EU countries, we find that debate exposure led to increased cognitive and political involvement and EU support among young citizens. Unfortunately, the debate has only reached a very small audience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Civic education can have a significant impact on democracy. This article offers evidence for this assertion by comparing the effects of the widely different choices made in the early 1990s by two post-communist countries: Poland and Hungary. Initially, the effects of civic education were confined to teenagers; later, as generational replacement started to have an effect, one can see an impact on the politics of the two countries. The success of civic education in Poland and its failure in Hungary is illustrated by the differences in young people’s voting patterns: throughout the last decade, the vote of Polish youth has consistently been less authoritarian than the vote of older Poles, unlike in Hungary, where the pattern is reversed. Ultimately, these developments likely had an impact on democracy: one sees democratic progress in Poland and democratic regression in Hungary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars agree that political tolerance is a key ingredient of democracy, but the question of what exactly do they mean by 'political tolerance' is more controversial. Some define it as a subject's permissiveness toward her least liked group, while others define it as open-mindedness vis-à-vis issues such as homosexuality, prostitution, divorce or abortion. Our goal in this brief research note is to test whether using one or the other definition makes a difference. Using factor analysis of crossnational survey data, we find that the respondents' attitudes toward the two types of issues load on different dimensions. These results indicate that only one of the two dimensions truly captures political tolerance (or libertarianism), while the substantive content of the other dimension relates to social liberalism, rather than political tolerance. This finding is confirmed at the level of individual countries, including Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]