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When conducting a postal survey, a traditional recommendation is to use paper postage stamps instead of an automated postage system, to make sure that invitations have a more personal and attractive appearance. In this research note, we investigate whether this traditional recommendation is still valid. In the autumn of 2020, a postal survey was conducted among high-school teachers in Belgium strictly adhering to the Dillman protocol. The overall response rate was 43.4%. Invitations with a real paper postage stamp had a three-percentage points higher response rate (44.9% versus 41.8%), but this difference proved not to be significant. There are no significant gender or age differences between the groups. In addition, the presence or absence of a paper stamp did not influence the respondents’ choice for answering the questionnaire online or on paper, as those who received a stamped envelope were equally likely to choose the online answering tool.

It has been assumed that a trend toward devolution within a federal country would be associated with a growing apart of public opinion, and the federal kingdom of Belgium is routinely cited as an obvious example in this regard. Since the publication of the seminal Billiet et al. article, more competences have been devolved toward the autonomous regions, and in this research note we update the expectation that this has led to a further growing apart of public opinion in the country. Based on both electoral studies (2009/2014/2019), and the European Social Survey (2002–2018) we investigate whether these institutional differences are associated with a growing apart of public opinion in the regions of Belgium. Our results suggest that while there are clear attitudinal differences between the two major groups in the country, these differences are stable throughout the three-decade observation period. Differences are becoming more outspoken, however, with regard to the preferred extent of federalism. Interestingly, however, the dynamics in public opinion in this regard do not follow the same pattern as electoral results would suggest.

In this paper, we empirically investigate what kind of welfare concerns drive electoral support for radical right populist parties. The literature on the rise of populism in Western democracies argues that rising inequality is associated with more support for populist radical right parties. This leads to the assumption that populist radical right voters are in favour of more effective redistribution policies. We test this question using logistic regression analysis on the basis of the European Social Survey’s 2016 welfare module. We distinguish various forms of welfare preferences, which allow us to conclude that voters of radical right populist parties mainly tend to display welfare chauvinistic and socially conservative tendencies and are highly selective in the kind of programmes they support. While these parties' rhetoric in a number of cases now includes concern about inequality, we do not find this to be a major voting motive among these voters.

Political participation is, by definition, a multifaceted social phenomenon, and different theoretical approaches in participation studies tend to focus on one of these facets. This chapter argues that the meso-level (organizations, mobilization campaigns …) offers most opportunities to combine different theoretical perspectives to the study of political participation. While acknowledging that specific theoretical perspectives can be antagonistic, e.g., between rational theory and cultural approaches, it is also pointed out that a comprehensive study of political participation will require at least some dialogue between different perspectives or even theoretical integration. The chapter closes with the development of an integrated model, combining individual, cultural, and structural elements in one comprehensive model that can enable future scholars to explain the success of participation and mobilization in various contexts. Especially when the effects of political participation are the topic under investigation, it seems imperative to develop such an integrated model.

Political consumerism, that is, the buying or boycotting of goods and services for political or ethical reasons, is now firmly accepted as a form of political participation increasingly adopted by the young. In this article we investigate two claims often made concerning the democratic potential of political consumerism. First, visibility bias would imply that political consumerism mainly targets visible and often symbolic goods, without real economic impact. Our results suggest that participants indeed tend to focus on goods, and neglect services, despite the growing importance of the service sector. Second, it has been argued that political consumerism is only a weapon for the ‘happy few’. Our results indeed show that especially higher educated and progressive respondents tend to use political consumerism. Although our findings are based on specific samples in Belgium, and therefore cannot be generalised, we close with some observations on the broader democratic impact of political consumerism.

It has been argued that supporting a restrictive view on the inclusion of immigrants finds its origin in a localized feeling of group identity. We test this hypothesis with a household survey in th...

Studies have shown that the economic crisis that started in 2008 was followed by a sharp decline in political trust in some liberal democracies. These findings suggest that an economic downturn might contribute to a more structural crisis of democratic legitimacy. From 2011 on, however, unemployment levels in industrialized democracies started to decline again. In this paper, we investigate how public opinion reacted to this gradual economic recovery. Previous studies examining economic evaluations by the public suggest that there is a negativity bias, with public opinion reacting stronger to an economic downturn than to economic growth. We analyse the ESS data from 2002 to 2016 (eight waves) and find that public opinion reacted positively to economic recovery, with levels of political trust gradually rising to pre-crisis levels in most countries. In the discussion section, we reflect on the implications of our findings for the study of trends in political trust.

Theories on economic voting and democratic accountability are rooted in the reward–punishment hypothesis, stating that voters punish incumbent governments for economic decline and reward them for economic expansion. We argue that this accountability mechanism goes beyond economic performance indicators, as voters take into account a moral perspective about the economy as well. More specifically, we argue that when economic inequality is high, citizens’ social justice preferences are infringed upon, which could lower support for the incumbent. Moreover, as inequality leads to higher levels of conflict over economic resources, we should observe higher levels of economic voting in unequal contexts. Hence, we hypothesise that (1) economic inequality is negatively related to electoral support for the incumbent party (parties), and (2) the level of economic inequality moderates the effect of perceptions of economic performance on electoral support for the incumbent party (parties). We test our hypotheses using hierarchical models based on the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the European Social Survey. While we do not find support for a direct effect of inequality on electoral support, our findings strongly support the second hypothesis: incumbents are punished more strongly for a bad economic performance when economic inequality in the country is high.

While youth suffrage is widely debated, the causal effects of being eligible to vote on adolescents' political attitudes are less well known. To gain insights into this question, we leverage data from a real-life quasi-experiment of voting at 16 in the city of Ghent (Belgium). We compare the attitudes of adolescents that were entitled to vote with their peers that just fell below the age cut-off. We also examine the effects of the enfranchisement at 18-years-old. While we find an effect of youth enfranchisement on attention to politics, there is no evidence for an effect of enfranchisement on political engagement overall.

Previous studies have investigated to what extent voters can achieve proximity between their preferences and the positions of the party they vote for. Combining data from the European Social Survey and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, we investigate whether trust in political parties increases ideological proximity voting. We argue that voters use their level of trust in parties as a heuristic mechanism. First, trust can increase proximity voting because citizens need to trust that political parties will take voters’ policy preferences into account when in government. Second, we examine whether low-trusting voters tend to cast a protest vote, and do not engage in ideological proximity voting. We test this assumption regarding three determinants of the vote choice: general left-right ideology views, preferences for income redistribution, and anti-immigrant sentiments. We find that ideological proximity voting is indeed moderated by trust: those who trust political parties are more likely to cast a vote based on their policy preferences, while those who distrust tend to vote for protest parties. Nevertheless, also among protest voters, trust is conducive for higher levels of proximity voting. publishedVersion

Lowering the voting age is often criticized due to the alleged political immaturity of young voters, which is considered as negative for the quality of democracy. We adopt a unique approach to this issue by measuring political congruence between adolescents and their parents to ascertain whether ideological views and salient positional issues, such as attitudes on immigration, differ between different age groups in adolescence. Using a household survey in the city of Ghent (Belgium), first we compare political ideologies and attitudes toward immigration for those of age between 15 and 19, and their parents. We find that adolescent children tend to resemble the political ideologies of their parents, and they also tend to have similar attitudes about immigration. Second, we find that ideological resemblance is even higher among adolescents that regularly talk about politics with their parents. Finally, we do not find evidence that political congruence with parents differs by the age of adolescent children or their right to vote. Therefore, we conclude that political ideology and positional views are formed in an early stage of adolescence, i.e., before the age of 15. Our findings have relevance for the debate about lowering the voting age, as it points to already clearly formed ideological views and political attitudes at early stages of adolescent life.

ispartof: JOURNAL OF ELECTIONS PUBLIC OPINION AND PARTIES status: published

Most studies on lowering the voting age to 16 exclusively focus on the effects on the adolescents concerned. In this paper we investigate the family dynamics of this extension of voting rig...

Mass media have been accused of cultivating anti-immigrant sentiments in Western societies. Most studies on this topic, however, have not made a distinction between the types of television program (information vs. entertainment) or television station (public vs. commercial). Adopting a comparative approach, we use data from the six waves of the European Social Survey (ESS, 2002–2012, n = 162,987) to assess the relationship between individual and aggregate level patterns of television consumption and anti-immigrant sentiments in European societies. Individual television viewing time is positively associated with anti-immigrant sentiments, while frequent exposure to news and information programs is associated with lower levels of anti-immigrant sentiments. At the aggregate level we observe a positive effect of the total viewing time in society on anti-immigrant sentiments. In the conclusion we offer some suggestions on how this effect could be explained.

Progressive tax rates are one of the main instruments for redistribution within advanced liberal democracies. In this study, we investigate public support for this policy. In our analysis of a novel question included in the Belgian Electoral Study (2019) we show that left-wing citizens are strongly in favour of this system. Importantly, high levels of political sophistication strengthen the association between ideology and preferences for progressive taxation, while political sophistication weakens the association between income and rejecting progressive tax policies. Support for a flat tax policy follows exactly the opposite pattern. Hence, for a highly sophisticated group apparently there is no conflict between a tax system that might hurt their short-term material interests, and support for a more equal society. ispartof: Journal Of European Public Policy vol:29 issue:4 pages:550-567 status: published

Studies on political knowledge routinely find that women have lower levels of political knowledge than men. This gender gap in political knowledge is usually interpreted as troublesome for democracy, because a lack of political knowledge could imply that women’s participation in politics is less effective and that their interests will be represented less well than those of men. In this short article, we present a direct test of the assumption that women are less effective voters because of this lack of political knowledge. We make use of CSES data to study gender differences in proximity voting and correct voting. Our results do not suggest that women vote less correctly than men—a conclusion that prompts important questions about the role of different forms of political knowledge, and the seemingly gendered nature of the vote choice.

The literature on economic voting starts from the assumptions that citizens have a sufficiently high level of knowledge about their country’s economic situation, and that they vote according to their perception of the state of the economy. However, these assumptions have been challenged as economic perceptions could be plagued by partisan bias. We use the comparative dataset of the European Social Survey to investigate partisan bias in the perception of economic performance. Firstly, we observe that the economic perceptions of both supporters and opponents of governing parties are strongly related to real-life economic indicators such as gross domestic product growth and unemployment levels. Secondly, we find that shifts in economic performance (growth and unemployment) are strongly associated with similar changes in economic perceptions among both supporters of governing parties and opposition parties. There is, however, a significant but limited partisan bias in economic perceptions in countries with high levels of unemployment.

National probability election surveys are more and more abandoned. Decreasing response rates and the escalating costs of face-to-face and telephone interviews have strengthened election scholars’ reliance on nonprobability internet samples to conduct election surveys online. In a number of countries, experiments with alternative ways of recruiting respondents and different interview modes have been well documented. For other countries, however, substantially less is known about the consequences of relying on nonprobability internet panels. In this paper, we investigate the effects of survey mode and sampling method in the Belgian context. This is a particularly important and relevant case study because election researchers in Belgium can draw a sample of voters directly from the National Register. In line with previous studies, we find important differences in the marginal distributions of variables measured in the two surveys. When considering vote choice models and the inferences that scholars would draw, in contrast, we find minor differences.

The campaign leading to the 2016 US presidential election included a number of unconventional forms of campaign rhetoric. In earlier analyses, it was claimed that the Trump victory could be seen as a form of protest voting. This article analyzes the determinants of voters’ choices to investigate the validity of this claim. Based on a sample of the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, our analyses suggest that a Trump vote cannot be explained by a lack of trust in politics or low levels of satisfaction with democracy, as would be assumed given the extant literature on protest voting. However, indicators of racist resentment and anti-immigrant sentiments proved to be important determinants of a Trump vote—even when controlling for more traditional vote-choice determinants. Despite ongoing discussion about the empirical validity of racist resentment and anti-immigrant sentiments, both concepts proved to be roughly equally powerful in explaining a Trump vote.

This book review finds that in a new handbook on political trust, the recent literature on political trust is summarised by highly distinguished authors. Both theoretical and empirical chapters are...

Lifestyle politics are often defined as a political strategy used to avoid state-oriented politics. However, recent studies indicate that in some cases, lifestyle activists engage in actions that target the state. This study investigates why some lifestyle activists combine these forms of engagement, while others do not. We explore whether such differences can be explained by variations in activists' perceptions of the political opportunity structure. In particular, we consider whether perceptions of input structures and output structures offer relevant predictors for combining lifestyle politics with state-oriented actions. The article presents an in-depth case study of a Belgian environmental lifestyle movement organization, using a mixed methods approach including participant observation, qualitative interviewing, and surveys. The findings reveal that lifestyle activists' perceptions of the openness of the system matter, but that beliefs in the state's ability to act are more diverse and therefore have a stronger effect on activists' propensity for state-oriented action.

Normative democratic theory assumes that political systems should ensure civil, political and social rights, and this claim has become more salient since the economic crisis that began in 2008. This conception of citizenship was developed most prominently by T.H. Marshall (1950), and it has been further elaborated by numerous other authors, resulting in a clear division between procedural/electoral democracy concepts and authors emphasizing egalitarian concepts of democracy. We use latent class analysis to assess democratic ideals among European citizens as reported in the 2012 European Social Survey. The findings demonstrate that a majority of Europeans consider political and social rights as equally important, while some citizens predominantly emphasize either political or social rights. Furthermore, the focus on social rights is not limited to those with left-leaning ideologies. Considering current manifestations of discontent about the politics of austerity, we discuss the implications of social citizenship concepts for democratic legitimacy in Europe. ispartof: Government and Opposition vol:53 issue:4 pages:595-620 ispartof: location:Maastricht status: published

Within research on the political influence that social network members exert on one another, some studies rely on information obtained directly from different members in the network separately (self-reported measures), while others rely on information obtained from one key informant within the social network (measures based on perception). In this research note, we investigate the difference between these self-reported and perceived measures by analyzing the correspondence of voting intentions within the family. On the one hand, we examine this correspondence using information obtained from only one family member. On the other hand, we use the self-reported measures obtained from all family members separately. To analyze the differences and the implications of both approaches, we use data from the Parent-Child Socialization Study (PCSS), a survey conducted among 2,085 mothers, fathers and children in the Flemish region of Belgium (2012). Our analyses suggest that using perceptual measures can be problematic in many ways and could lead researchers to different or even opposite conclusions than using self-reported measures from all individual respondents. ispartof: Political Science Research and Methods vol:5 issue:2 pages:367-378 status: published

© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature Political theorists have argued that democracies should strive for high turnout, leading to an argument for the introduction of compulsory voting, one of the surest ways to increase turnout. Others have warned that this obligation comes at a cost of lower quality votes. We investigate these claims by examining the impact of compulsory voting on proximity voting. First, we examine individuals’ voting behavior in three countries with strong compulsory voting laws: Australia, Belgium and Brazil. Election surveys in these countries include a hypothetical question about the likelihood of voting without legal obligation. We continue with an examination of the effects of compulsory voting in Switzerland, which varies across cantons. Our results support the ‘reluctant voter’ hypothesis: Compelling voters to vote tends to weaken the impact of proximity considerations on electoral behaviour, although this effect remains limited and is only significant in half of the elections that were investigated. ispartof: POLITICAL BEHAVIOR vol:41 issue:1 pages:209-230 status: published

Previous research has established a correlation between fear of crime and anti-immigrant sentiments. In this paper, we explore the role of television in explaining individual differences in fear of crime, perceived ethnic diversity and anti-immigrant sentiments. We use the ‘Social Cohesion Indicators in Flanders’ data, a representative survey in the Flemish region of Belgium, combined with real life indicators of ethnic diversity and crime at the community level. Results of a multilevel structural equation model suggest that watching television is positively associated with fear of crime and perceived ethnic diversity, which in turn is associated with anti-immigrant sentiments. Preference for public television is, however, associated with lower anti-immigrant sentiments, perceived ethnic diversity and fear of crime levels. Real crime and ethnic diversity levels are only weakly related to anti-immigrant sentiments. We conclude that especially perceptions are important in influencing anti-immigrant sentiments and that television use is associated with these perceptions. peerreview_statement: The publishing and review policy for this title is described in its Aims & Scope. aims_and_scope_url: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=reus20 ispartof: European Societies vol:19 issue:3 pages:243-267 status: published

The literature on participatory democracy suggests that citizens’ direct democratic involvement will be associated with higher levels of democratic legitimacy. Simultaneously, however, it has been pointed out that a repeated reliance on direct democracy procedures might lead to democratic fatigue among citizens, and it might even lead to a ‘participation paradox’, as a proliferation of forms of participation in practice leads to more inequality. In this paper, we investigate to what extent direct democracy indeed has an effect on participation levels. Only for voting, we find that direct democracy has a direct dampening effect. Also, for non-institutionalized forms of political participation, we find that citizens with a low socio-economic status are even less likely to participate when they live in a country where direct democratic instruments are extensively available. We close with some observations on what effect direct democracy might have on the overall functioning of representative democracy. ispartof: Comparative European Politics vol:16 issue:4 pages:724-744 status: published

Democratic elections imply that the electorate holds incumbents accountable for past performance, and that voters select the party that is closest to their own political preferences. Previous resea...

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We know compulsory voting is associated with higher levels of electoral turnout. It has been suggested, however, that this leads to a trade-off with the quality of the vote, i.e., the ideological congruence between voters and the party they vote for. In this study, this claim is investigated using data from the 2007, 2010, and 2013 elections in Australia. We also include a comparison with two recent elections in Belgium, another country with compulsory voting and almost equally high turnout figures. The results show that reluctant voters vote less ideologically congruent, but that this effect is mediated by the lower levels of political knowledge and political interest of these voters. However, this does not lead to less ideologically congruent election results at the aggregate level and compulsory voting does not seem to have an impact on electoral results. We speculate that in future studies on compulsory voting, it is important to make a distinction between reluctant voters, and those who take a strong hostile stand on the electoral process. peerreview_statement: The publishing and review policy for this title is described in its Aims & Scope. aims_and_scope_url: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=cajp20 ispartof: Australian Journal of Political Science vol:52 issue:1 pages:75-94 status: published

Turnout rates are in decline in advanced democracies, but the consequences of this trend for inequalities in participation have not yet been investigated in a large, comparative study. In this arti...

© 2016 European Consortium for Political Research. There is a consensus in recent literature on electoral research that voter turnout rates are declining significantly. We know less, however, about when this decline started and how significant it is. In this paper, we analyse trends in electoral turnout, as reported in the IDEA dataset for 20 stable democracies over the period between 1950 and 2012, which covers 349 elections. The results show that turnout levels were stable until approximately 1980. A significant linear decline can be observed from 1980 onward. Various institutional elements related to turnout levels-such as the closeness of elections, or the effective number of parties-do not explain this spline or the particular curve of the decline. We close with a number of suggestions for future research that may ascertain this relation in more depth. ispartof: European Political Science vol:16 issue:4 pages:535-552 status: published

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. While in the older literature, low levels of political trust were routinely interpreted as a lack of support for democracy, more recently authors have claimed that the value pattern of critical citizens is a hallmark for a mature and stable democratic system. In this paper we assess the empirical validity of this claim, by relying on the relative deprivation literature highlighting the relation between expectation and frustration. The 2012 wave of the European Social Survey included an extensive battery measuring democratic ideals, and using latent class analysis we identify a group with high ideals on how a democracy should function. Multilevel regression analysis shows that strong democratic ideals are associated with lower levels of political trust, and most strongly so in countries with low quality of government. We close with observations on how rising democratic ideals could be a cause for the occurrence of a new group of ‘critical citizens’. peerreview_statement: The publishing and review policy for this title is described in its Aims & Scope. aims_and_scope_url: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=ccpo20 ispartof: Contemporary Politics vol:23 issue:2 pages:214-230 status: published

Low levels of political trust are associated with a preference for protest parties. Some authors have argued that protest parties in this manner indirectly contribute to the stability of electoral democracy, functioning as ‘safety valve’ for political discontent. In this paper, we investigate the relation between protest voting and political trust in a dynamic perspective, relying on a five year long Belgian panel study. We confirm that citizens with low levels of political trust are more likely to vote for protest parties. Additionally, we point out that decreasing levels of trust significantly increase the probability of voting for a protest party, even controlling for absolute levels of trust. Most importantly, having voted for a protest party in 2009 explains a subsequent further drop in political trust during the 2009-2014 observation period. The panel analysis suggests that distrust and protest voting reinforce one another, leading to a potential spiral of distrust. ispartof: Government and Opposition vol:53 issue:1 pages:104-130 status: published

Citizenship education has evolved substantially in recent decades, with a rapid proliferation of education forms and approaches. The currently available evaluation studies, however, do not allow us to determine what kind of approach can be considered as a best practice for schools and education systems. In this article, we rely on the results of a 5-year panel study to investigate the long-term effects of various forms of citizenship education. Using the Belgian Political Panel Survey (n = 3,025), a three-wave longitudinal panel survey of 16-, 18- and 21-year-old Belgian late adolescents and young adults, we determine which citizenship education effort (i.e., classroom instruction, being a member of a school council, and an open-classroom climate) has a long-term effect on political trust and political interest. The results suggest that classroom instruction, the presence of an open-classroom climate, and being a member of a school board are positively related to political trust. We also find that...

Objective: We took advantage of a large multinational recruitment to delineate genotype-phenotype correlations in a large, trans-European multicenter cohort of patients with spastic paraplegia gene 7 (SPG7). Methods: We analyzed clinical and genetic data from 241 patients with SPG7, integrating neurologic follow-up data. One case was examined neuropathologically. Results: Patients with SPG7 had a mean age of 35.5 ± 14.3 years (n = 233) at onset and presented with spasticity (n = 89), ataxia (n = 74), or both (n = 45). At the first visit, patients with a longer disease duration (>20 years, n = 62) showed more cerebellar dysarthria (p < 0.05), deep sensory loss (p < 0.01), muscle wasting (p < 0.01), ophthalmoplegia (p < 0.05), and sphincter dysfunction (p < 0.05) than those with a shorter duration (, SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published