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Consultative referendums are becoming more widely used as a way of responding to rising public discontent with the workings of representative democracy. Consequently, consultative referendums have become an integral part of democratic decision-making processes across the world. However, how the population reacts to the referendum outcome is expected to differ among the population as referendums, by design, divides the participants into winners and losers. In turn, creating a winner-loser gap with potentially polarizing societal consequences. This study therefore seeks to explore how this winner-loser gap is associated with several types of referendum attitudes following the outcome of a local referendum. Using survey data (N = 3113) gathered after a high stakes local referendum in Finland, the more explicit research purpose is therefore to analyze how individual-level opinions about referendums, turnout thresholds and margin of victory thresholds are related to the winner-loser gap. Additionally, we also control for whether these associations are moderated by external efficacy and political trust. The results clearly imply that the winner-loser gap have consequences for several types of referendum attitudes, contributing to scholarship about the effects derived from the winner-loser gap.

Local consultative referendums are a widely used democratic innovation. Nevertheless, there is still limited knowledge about the local effects following a referendum, especially in terms of how the public reactions varies given if a citizen has been on the winning or on the losing side of the referendum. The purpose with this study is therefore to add to this line of research by assessing how a local referendum about a municipal merger affects external political efficacy and political trust within a local community. By analysing two cross-sectional datasets collected in a bilingual Finnish municipality before a merger referendum, in 2018 (N = 6,686), and after the referendum, in 2020 (N = 3,133), as a pseudo-experiment of effects of a municipal merger, we show that the aggregated levels of external political efficacy and political trust have increased and vary based on being on the winning or losing side of the referendum.

Folkomröstningar utgör en politisk metod för att öka den demokratiska legitimiteten för ett politiskt beslut. I Finland bidrog en lagändring år 1990 till attdet även blev möjligt att arrangera rådgivande folkomröstningar på kommunal nivå. Den politiska makten kvarstår hos kommunfullmäktige, folkomröstningsresultatet till trots, och kommunfullmäktigen runt om i Finland har vidupprepade tillfällen valt att gå emot resultatet från folkomröstningen. Trotsdetta finns det fortfarande en brist på studier i vilka man har fokuserat på hurresultatet i folkomröstningen inverkar på det efterföljande politiska beslutsfattandet i kommunfullmäktige. Denna studie bidrar till att fylla den forskningsluckan genom att närmare studera i vilken utsträckning valdeltagandet ochsegermarginalen inverkar på kommunfullmäktigebeslutet att antingen följaeller inte följa resultatet av folkomröstningen. Studiens resultat visar att när segermarginalen är lägre ökar också sannolikheten för att kommunfullmäktigeska rösta emot majoritetsviljan medan valdeltagandet inte verkar att ha någoninverkan på kommunfullmäktigebeslutet. Detta indikerar att när folkviljanblir tillräckligt tydlig, ökar även kongruensen mellan ett folkomröstningsresultat och kommunfullmäktigebeslut, vilket i praktiken innebär att resultatetav en rådgivande folkomröstning vid en klar segermarginal förvandlas till ettpolitiskt bindande utfall., Referendums constitute a political method for increasing the level of democratic legitimacy for a policy decision. An amendment in the Finnish constitution in 1990 enabled the organization of municipal level consultative referendums. The political power remains at the municipal council, irrespective of the referendum result, and municipal councils across Finland have on several occasions chosen to vote against the outcome of the referendums. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of studies focusing on how the outcome of a municipal level referendum affects the political behavior of municipal councils. This study aims at contributing to this line of research by analyzing to what extent the voter turnout and margin of victory following a referendum affects the willingness of municipal councils to act accordingly, or not, to the results. Our results show that when the majority size of the winning side in the referendum is lower, the possibility for the municipal council to act against the majority will increase, while voter turnout does not seem to have any effect. This indicates that when the public opinion becomes sufficiently clear, the congruence between the referendum outcome and the municipal council decision increases, meaning that the result from a consultative referendum in reality transforms into a politically binding political outcome.

The recent wave of electoral success for right- wing populists has coincided with an increase in political scandals as well as a new, neo- populist type, of scandals. Thus, it has been argued that the public might have become increasingly numb to scandals and that scandalous behaviour by populist politicians is often neglected as part of their ‘typical’ behavior. In this article, we explore how involvement in neo- populist scandals affects the public’s trust in individual politi-cians and whether this effect is moderated by the politician’s party affiliation – both populist and non- populist – and party preferences of citizens judging a scandal. We also compare the effects with two other types of traditional scandals, involving financial misconduct or an extra- marital affair. Two factorial vignette survey experiments (N = 1,000 and 1,577) were carried out in 2017 and 2019 to explore whether and how neo- populist scandals affect trust in politi-cians under varying circumstances. The key findings are that neo- populist scandals clearly have negative effects on trust for a scandalous politician but the judgement of scandals are subject to strong partisanship effects. Thus, supporters of a populist party do not see a scandalous behaviour by a populist politician as harmful for their trust in that politician. This effect is not evident among supporters of a traditional party when ‘their’ politician is involved in a scandal. Populist supporters also tend not to see scandals in general as especially harmful to their trust in politicians, regardless of type of scandal nor affiliation of a scandalous politician.

Context: Container-based virtualization is gaining popularity in different domains, as it supports continuous development and improves the efficiency and reliability of run-time environments. Problem: Different techniques are proposed for monitoring the security of containers. However, there are no guidelines supporting the selection of suitable techniques for the tasks at hand. Objective: We aim to support the selection and design of techniques for monitoring container-based virtualization environments. Approach:: First, we review the literature and identify techniques for monitoring containerized environments. Second, we classify these techniques according to a set of categories, such as technical characteristic, applicability, effectiveness, and evaluation. We further detail the pros and cons that are associated with each of the identified techniques. Result: As a result, we present CONSERVE, a multi-dimensional decision support framework for an informed and optimal selection of a suitable set of container monitoring techniques to be implemented in different application domains. Evaluation: A mix of eighteen researchers and practitioners evaluated the ease of use, understandability, usefulness, efficiency, applicability, and completeness of the framework. The evaluation shows a high level of interest, and points out to potential benefits.

With deliberative democracy becoming increasingly incorporated into political processes, the instances of citizens and politicians meeting in deliberation, so-called mixed deliberations, is increasing too. While these are important steps towards more deliberative systems, the mixed deliberation setting nonetheless introduces certain risks regarding equality. Citizens and politicians have different deliberative capacities, which could affect the process of deliberation. Moreover, political inequalities such as gender gaps may be more evident in deliberations where politicians are present. This study focuses on a series of mixed deliberations in 2018 about a proposed municipal merger in Finland. Using content analysis of speech acts (N = 3404) as well as pre- and post-deliberation surveys (N = 225), we analyze patterns according to participant status (politician/citizen) and gender regarding dominance, deliberative discussion quality, and impact on internal and external efficacy. The findings show that politicians dominated the discussions and achieved a higher deliberative quality than citizens. The findings also revealed that women achieved higher deliberative quality in their speech acts.