While existing research has considered how individual-level social mobility experiences affect a person's political outlook, less attention has been paid to how historic levels of social mobility in local areas influence political attitudes and political behaviour. We link individual-level data from to small area estimates of social class mobility derived from the decennial census. We find that living in a low absolute social mobility area was associated with a higher probability of voting 'Leave' in the 2016 UK European Union membership referendum. However, we find no evidence that historical social mobility rates in the local area predict abstention in general elections or attitudinal indicators of political alienation. Given declining rates of upwards mobility, and increasing levels of downwards mobility, our results have important implications for understanding geographies of political discontent.

Cultural criteria, like language skills and values, are salient features of nationalism discourse, reflecting imagined boundaries that separate ingroup from outgroup member when thinking about the nation. Despite their salience, the relationship between cultural membership criteria and other civic (attainable) or ethnic (ascriptive) national boundaries, along with their implications for intergroup relations, is contested. Using surveys from  = 6448 majority group members in the Canadian province of Québec, we argue cultural boundaries are empirically distinct from civic and ethnic ones. Cultural and civic criteria are both prominent prerequisites for membership into the Québécois national community, but cultural criteria show markedly divergent relationships with outgroup attitudes. The results underline the importance of conceptualizing cultural boundaries as a distinct set of national membership criteria and question the construct validity of blended ethnocultural boundary measures or approaches that aggregate civic and cultural criteria together as equally "attainable" markers of national membership.

Why do people oppose granting social rights to immigrants? Previous research indicates that psychological predispositions such as authoritarianism or ethnocentrism are strong drivers, but our understanding of their roles is still incomplete. This is in part because studies have not yet systematically tested different psychological variables against other, but also in part because some other potentially important predispositions such as implicit bias and social dominance orientation have so far been overlooked. We address this gap using original data from survey experiments conducted in six countries (Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States). We find consistent effects of ethnocentrism and social dominance orientation, a less robust effect of authoritarianism and no effect of implicit bias. In substantive terms, we find that a belief in ethnocentric stereotypes and a desire for dominance are the central factors driving opposition to immigrants' social rights.

Party-group relations are today characterized by various forms of alignments. These include the persistence of traditional class alignments, the realignment of economic groups due to identity politics and alignments of groups at the centre of identity politics. This study analyses the group-based messaging of parties in relation to these three groups. We argue that, contrary to the catch-all party thesis, positive and negative group appeals of parties are (still) structured by parties' support among social groups and by groups either liked or disliked by their voters. Our argument is tested through a content analysis of election materials in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, combined with survey data. The results indicate that group appeals are indeed shaped by electoral support among social groups and attitudes towards them. Results also suggest that the former effect is present for traditionally aligned economic and identity politics groups, but not for realigned economic groups.

In this article, we investigate how external election interventions influence satisfaction with democracy. We expect that mere knowledge about a foreign intervention will affect system support. Instead, only those who believe that the external influence campaign had a decisive impact on the election outcome should see a reduction in democratic satisfaction. Furthermore, since electoral winners are likely to think that their preferred party provides superior policy outputs, supporters of winning parties should be less affected by their beliefs in the decisiveness of an influence campaign. Finally, we expect that those who place a high value on in-group loyalty will be more likely to engage in motivated reasoning. Thus, in-group loyalty should cause electoral winners to discount the substantive impact of a given electoral intervention, whereas it should have the opposite effect for losers. Our analysis relies on US survey data, and it uncovers broad support for our theoretical expectations.

There are two rival conceptions of power in modern sociopolitical thought. According to one, all social power reduces to . According to another, the core notion is , to which even power-over reduces. This article defends seven theses. First, agential social power consists in a relation between agent and outcomes (power-to). Second, not all social power reduces to power-over and, third, the contrary view stems from conflating power-over with a distinct notion: . Fourth, the widespread assumption that social power presupposes the capacity to overcome resistance is false: social power includes the capacity to effect outcomes others' . Fifth, can be exercised via joint intentional action, strategic coordination and non-strategic coordination. Sixth, agential social power is best analysed as a capacity effect outcomes, the assistance of others, the resistance of yet others. Seventh, power-over and power-with are not mutually exclusive: each can ground the other.

How do successful deliberations unfold? What happens when they unravel? In this article, I propose that we think of the dynamics of participant engagement within deliberation as series of self-interested and reciprocal investments in and divestments from . This article has three parts. First, I draw on the literatures on deliberative democracy and social capital to outline a theory of deliberative capital. I highlight the important role self-interest plays in the process of those initial investments - instances of engagement in positive deliberative behaviours. Second, drawing from my experience as a facilitator, I give an account of the particular indicators of investments and divestments that we might expect to see in a given deliberative engagement. Third, I briefly outline two innovative facilitation techniques that can be utilized at the beginning or during a deliberative process that trigger self-interest, which incentivizes investments and discourages divestments.

Leftist and rightist populist parties in Western Europe both oppose trade openness. Is support for economic protectionism also relevant for their electorates? We assess this in the Netherlands, where both types of populist parties have seats in parliament. Analyses of representative survey data ( = 1,296) demonstrate that support for protectionism drives voting for such parties, as do the well-established determinants of political distrust (both populist constituencies), economic egalitarianism (leftist populist constituency) and ethnocentrism (rightist populist constituency). Surprisingly, support for protectionism does not mediate the relationship between economic egalitarianism and voting for left-wing populists, or the link between political distrust and voting for either left-wing or right-wing populist parties. In contrast, support for protectionism partly mediates the association between ethnocentrism and voting for right-wing populists. We discuss the largely independent role of protectionism in populist voting in relation to the cultural cleavage in politics and electoral competition, and also provide suggestions for future research.

District magnitude and list type shape the incentives for politicians to develop a personal vote. If voters also react to these strategies, their knowledge about candidates should be influenced by these features of the electoral system. This article directly tests the responsiveness of voters by employing individual-level survey data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. As district magnitude increases, more people remember at least one candidate in closed list systems, but there is no such effect in open list systems. These influences are also larger for non-voters than for voters. A measure of political contact is not affected in this way. The differential effect of district magnitude can be explained by a different campaign focus.

The prospect of a Brexit illustrates that the European Union's legitimacy deficit can have far-reaching political consequences. In normative political theory, realists take a keen interest in questions of legitimacy. Building on Bernard Williams' realist writings, I propose a two-step method of normative political theorization. Each step contains both a practice-sensitive phase and a practice-insensitive phase. First, the conceptualization of a norm should draw on conceptual resources available to agents within their historical circumstances. Second, the prescriptions that follow from this norm should take into account whether political order can be maintained. Applying this method to the European Union's democratic deficit yields, first, based on public opinion research, the norm of European deep diversity and, second, a set of prescriptions for a confederacy. Thereby, I demonstrate that this realist method is able to yield political theories distinct from other philosophical approaches. Moreover, I contribute a realist theory to the normative literature in European Union studies.

Scholars of mobilisation and policy influence employ two quite different approaches to mapping interest group systems. Those interested in research questions on mobilisation typically rely on a bottom-up mapping strategy in order to characterise the total size and composition of interest group communities. Researchers with an interest in policy influence usually rely on a top-down strategy in which the mapping of politically active organisations depends on samples of specific policies. But some scholars also use top-down data gathered for other research questions on mobilisation (and vice versa). However, it is currently unclear how valid such large-N data for different types of research questions are. We illustrate our argument by addressing these questions using unique data sets drawn from the INTEREURO project on lobbying in the European Union and the European Union's Transparency Register. Our findings suggest that top-down and bottom-up mapping strategies lead to profoundly different maps of interest group communities.