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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

Ineffective governance is known to weaken support for governments and leaders. However, it is less clear whether these effects spill over to the regime and erode support for the democratic system. This article returns to this classic question, now using time-series, cross-sectional data to test whether the effectiveness of governments in sustaining economic growth, providing quality healthcare, and tackling violent crime affects popular attitudes to democracy. We find that satisfaction with democracy is driven by fluctuations in economic performance and violent crime (but not healthcare quality). Diffuse support for democracy, in contrast, remains relatively impervious to changes in government effectiveness. Violent crime is the only indicator of effectiveness which has an impact on democratic support, and does so indirectly, via its influence on democratic satisfaction. These findings confirm that democratic support—which, unlike democratic satisfaction, is thought to help sustain democracy—is mostly immune to crises of performance.

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

The movement of personnel between roles in regulation, politics, and regulated industries is thought to affect the risks of politicization and industry capture of independent regulatory agencies. To test whether such movements are better explained by formal rules or by sector-specific patterns, we employ an original dataset of the 152 appointees to 11 IRAs in Portugal over the last 3 decades. We find that variations in the formal independence of agencies have been of little consequence. Instead, revolving doors abound in the financial sector, with a disproportionate share of regulators of that sector coming from, and moving back, to the industry. In turn, appointment of regulators with political links to Portuguese IRAs seems related with legacies of sectoral public control.

Corruption scandals and their investigation have been shown to undermine support not only for the allegedly involved public officials but also for political actors and institutions more generally. However, we know little about what happens when those investigations end up failing to result in punishments. Is citizens' trust in the legal authorities in charge of prosecuting and punishing corruption also undermined? Do those effects spill over to political actors, institutions, and even the political regime? We address these questions by taking advantage of an April 2021 judicial decision to drop corruption charges against former Portuguese Prime Minister José Sócrates during the fieldwork of a public opinion survey. We show that the decision had a substantial negative impact on public trust in the courts. Furthermore, although political trust was not immediately affected, its overall levels also became lower in comparison to periods before the judicial decision, suggesting a spillover effect.

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.